“You have my word I will do what I can to get the boy released.”

“Why?” Janey asked suddenly, “You are a stranger here and can have no interest in what becomes of Jem.”

Jonathan shrugged his shoulders. “I can never resist a distressed damsel, so long as she is passably pretty, of course,” he added self-mockingly.

“I am not distressed, sir! I am angry! And neither am I passably pretty!”

“No. Any man who considered you merely passable would be lacking in judgment and taste,” he said lazily, his eyes warm and teasing as they met her gaze.

Rake’s Reform
Marie-Louise Hall

www.millsandboon.co.uk

MARIE-LOUISE HALL

studied history at the University of London, where she met her husband. Now living in rural Aberdeenshire, she has had the ambition since marriage to find time to write. Domestically incompetent, she was thrilled when her husband took over the housework so that she could write. She also works for her husband’s oil industry consultancy and looks after her young son, six cats and three delinquent donkeys.

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter One

The courtroom was small, crowded, but utterly silent as the judge, resplendent in his crimson, put on his black cap and began to intone the words of the death sentence. Above in the gallery, a young woman sat as still and as rigid as the ashen-faced boy who stood in the dock, his hands clenched upon the wooden rail.

Miss Jane Hilton stared disbelievingly at the judge, her hazel eyes ablaze with anger beneath the wide brim of her black straw hat. This was nothing short of barbarism. This could not be happening! Not in England! Not in the supposedly civilised, well-mannered England of King William IV in this year of 1830. And she was not going to let it happen.

She was on her feet before she had stopped to think.

“How can you?” Her question rang out in the hushed room. “What crime has this child committed? Any farmer or labourer in this room could tell you that a rick of poorly cured hay may heat to the point where it catches fire without any assistance.”

There was a murmur of agreement from the more poorly dressed onlookers as every head in the lower part of the courtroom turned and looked upwards, including that of her guardian, Mr Filmore, who regarded her first with astonishment and then with tightlipped fury as he gestured to her furiously to sit down and be silent. The judge’s hooded eyelids lifted as he, too, stared at her with bloodshot blue eyes.

“Silence in the court, madam, or I shall have you removed from the building,” he roared.

“I shall not be silent!” Janey retorted. “I know Jem Avery is not guilty of arson. On the morning and at the same time as he is supposed to have set the rick alight, I passed him upon the road some five miles from the Pettridges Home Farm yard.”

“Indeed?” The judge’s bushy white brows lifted. “I trust you acquainted the defence counsel with this—” he paused “—alleged meeting.”

“Of course I did, but—” Janey began.

“M’lud?” The defence counsel stepped forward and said something in an undertone to the judge. American, unstable and prone to female fancies were the only words which Janey caught, but it was enough, combined with the smug smile of her guardian, to tell her why she had not been called as a witness.

“It seems your evidence was deemed unreliable,” the judge said, lifting his head again to look down his long nose at Janey. “So I must ask you a second time to be silent.”

“I will not!” Janey repeated furiously. “I have seen better justice administered by a lynch mob in St Louis than I have here today.”

“Then perhaps you had better go back there,” the judge sneered, earning sycophantic smiles from both defence and prosecution counsels, who were already surreptitiously shuffling their papers together. “Gentlemen,” he said laconically to two of the ushers who stood at the back of the gallery, “remove that woman from the courtroom.”

“I suppose I should not have lost my temper.” Janey sighed heavily a few minutes later as she stood next to her maid upon the steps of the courthouse, attempting to push strands of her flyaway fair hair back into the rather workmanlike chignon in which it was usually confined. “But that judge is a pompous, port-sodden old fool!”

“Yes, miss,” Kate agreed as she handed her the wide-brimmed hat which had become dislodged from Janey’s head during her somewhat undignified exit from the courtroom between the two ushers.

“It makes me so angry, Kate,” Janey went on as she rammed the hat down on her head. “Jem Avery has never hurt a soul in his life. The worse he has ever done is poach a rabbit or two to prevent his family from starving. I know he did not fire that rick, though Mr Filmore gave him reason enough in the way he treated him! It is monstrous to even suggest he should hang.”

“I know, miss,” Kate said sympathetically. “And there was not a Christian person in that room who did not agree with you.”

“Then why didn’t they all get up and say so!” Janey said, her American drawl more pronounced as it always was when she was angry. “Why don’t they demand a retrial?”

“Because that’s just not how it’s done here, miss. People don’t dare make a fuss, for fear they’ll lose their places or trade if they’re in business. You have to know someone, one of them…if Jem were a Duke’s son, then it would be different.”

“I know,” Janey said gratingly as she retied the grey silk ribbons on her hat beneath her pointed chin. She was almost as angry with herself as she was with the judge. After four years in England, she should have known better than to expect an instant public protest. Kate was right. That wasn’t how things were done here in this genteel and ancient English cathedral city, where the law was enforced to the letter and property valued above lives.

She glanced upwards at the serene, awesome spire of the nearby cathedral, which seemed almost to reach the grey November clouds, and sighed. Even the buildings in this corner of England seemed to have that air of superior certainty which she had encountered in so many of her English acquaintances.

God in his Heaven and everything and everyone in their proper place, including Miss Jane Hilton, colonial nobody, she thought, feeling a sudden overwhelming homesickness for the handful of ramshackle timber dwellings strung out along a muddy track, half a world away. That had been the nearest to a town she had known, until her parents’ death had forced her to return to St Louis, where her grandfather had found her.

The log cabins in which she had spent her childhood had had no attractions with which to rival either the medieval splendour of the cathedral or the exuberant prosperity of the timbered Tudor merchant’s houses that clustered about its close. And the people who had lived in them had often been rough and illiterate. But they would not have condemned a boy like Jem for the loss of a hayrick, which had in all probability set alight by itself.

No, she thought, Lilian, her parents, the Schmidts, the Lafayettes and the rest would all have been on their feet with her in that courtroom—and one way or another the judge would have been made to see reason.

She shut her eyes, seeing them all for a moment as if they were stood beside her. Her mother, fair, calm and beautiful, even with her apron besmirched with smuts and her sleeves rolled up. Her father, weathered and strong as the trees he had felled with his own hands to make the clearing that they had farmed. Proper Mrs Schmidt, looking askance at red-haired Lilian, who was as tough as the trappers she allowed to share both her cabin and her body. And Daniel, quiet, brown-eyed, brown-haired Daniel Lafayette, who had moved through the forest as silently as their Indian neighbours.

Daniel, who had been her childhood sweetheart and the first to die of the smallpox that had swept through the small frontier community. And with all the innocence and intensity of a fifteen-year-old, she had thought nothing worse could ever happen to her. And then her parents had become ill, and she knew that it could.

She shivered, remembering the sound of the earth being shovelled on to their rough wooden coffins by Lilian who, since she had had the smallpox as a child and survived it, had taken on the responsibility of nursing the sick and burying the dead.

“Miss?”

She started, wrenched back into the present by Kate’s voice.

“They’ll commute it, surely—give him transportation, won’t they?” Kate said hopefully.

“I don’t know,” Janey said flatly, swallowing the lump which had arisen in her throat. Hankering for the past and feeling sorry for herself was not going to help Jem. This was not Minnesota, this was England. Green, pleasant, and pitiless to its poor. And if she was going to save Jem’s neck, she had to think clearly and fast.

“They wouldn’t hang him, they couldn’t,” Kate added with a distinct lack of conviction. “He’s just a child, really.”

“I know,” Janey replied grimly. “But everyone is in such a panic of late because of the labourers’ riots in Kent and Hampshire that they are seeing the threat of revolution everywhere. If you had heard Mr Filmore and his fellow magistrates at dinner last night, you would have thought them in danger of being carted off to the guillotine at dawn. They see harshness as their protection.”

“But it’s not right!” Kate’s blue eyes brimmed with unshed tears. “If Mr Filmore had not dismissed him, this would never have happened. I don’t know how we’re going to break this to Mrs Avery, miss.”

“Nor do I, but I promised I should call and tell her of the verdict as soon as it was known,” Janey said grimly. “Where’s the gig, Kate?”

“That way, around the corner—I paid Tom Mitchell’s boy to hold the pony out of the master’s sight, like you said,” Kate replied.

“Thank you—I’d better go before Mr Filmore arrives and tries to stop me,” Janey said as others began to trickle down the courthouse steps. “Can you stay here and see if the warders will let you see Jem for a moment, or at least get a message to him that I will do everything I can for him? I saw Jem’s uncle, Will Avery, over there. I am sure he will give you a lift back to Pettridges if you ask him.”

“Yes, miss,” Kate agreed. “Miss—you’d better go. There’s Mr Filmore.”

With an unladylike oath acquired from Lilian, Janey picked up the skirts of her grey gown and pelisse coat and ran.

“Be careful, miss,” Kate admonished from behind, “that leg of yours is only just healed. You don’t want to break the other one.”

“Jane! Jane! Come here at once!” Janey increased her speed a little as Mr Filmore’s rather shrill tones overlaid Kate’s warning. But flicking a glance over her shoulder, she slowed a little. Mr Filmore’s over-inflated idea of his own dignity would not allow him to be seen chasing his ward down the street.

There would undoubtedly be a scene when she returned to Pettridges Hall, she thought resignedly as she scrambled into her gig and took up the reins. Not that she cared. While her grandfather had been alive, she had done her best to turn herself into the English lady he had so wanted her to be, out of affection for him. But she had no such feeling towards the Filmores, and what they thought of her had long since ceased to matter to her in the slightest.

Five months, she thought, as she cracked the whip over the skewbald pony’s head and sent it forward at a spanking trot. Five months, and she would be twenty-one, and she would have control of her fortune, her estate—and would be able to tell the Filmores to leave Pettridges.

Heads out, extended necks flecked with foam, the blood bays pulled the high-wheeled phaeton along the narrow lane at full lick. Bouncing from side to side on the rutted surface, the wheel hubs scraped first the high stone wall on one side then the other.

“You win, Jonathan! I still consider this contraption outmoded and damned uncomfortable, but I will grant you it is faster than anything in my carriage house. So, slow down!” the fair-haired man, sitting beside the driver, gasped as he held on to his tall silk hat with one hand and the safety rail with the other. “We’ll never make that bend at this speed and if there’s anything coming the other way—”

“You’re starting to sound like my maiden aunt, Perry.” The Honourable Jonathan Lindsay laughed, but he pulled upon the reins and began to slow the team of matched bays, who were snorting and sweating profusely. “For someone who was cool as a cucumber when Boney’s old Guard came on at Waterloo, you’ve made an almighty fuss for the last twenty minutes about a little speed.”

“At nineteen, one has not developed the instinct for self-preservation one has at thirty-two,” Perry said, sighing with relief as his dark-haired companion brought the bays down to a trot. “And I can assure you, I was far from cool…” A faraway look came on to his fresh ruddy face. “Is it really fifteen years ago? I still have nightmares about the sound of the damned French drums as if it were yesterday. And at the time, I didn’t think either of us would see our twentieth birthdays.”

“No.” Jonathan Lindsay sighed. “Neither did I, and sometimes I begin to wish that I hadn’t—”

“Begad! You have been bitten by the black dog!” Lord Derwent said, giving him a sharp look from his brown eyes. “What the devil is up with Jono? First, you announce you are giving up the tables, next, that you are going to bury yourself in the country—” He stopped and gave a theatrical groan. “You have not been spurned by Charlotte?”

Jonathan shook his fashionably tousled dark head.

“Or Amelia, or Emily Witherston?” Perry frowned as Jonathan’s craggily handsome face remained impassive. “Tell me it is not that ghastly Roberts girl—”

“Margaret? Allow me some taste!” His friend sighed again. “I have not fallen in love, Perry, and I have not the slightest intention of doing so!”

“Then what is chewing at you?” Lord Derwent persisted in asking. “Go on like this and you will be in danger of becoming positively dull.”

“Exactly!” Lindsay sighed again, checking the bays as he looked ahead and saw a small ragged-looking child swinging precariously upon one of the gates that interrupted the run of stone walling here and there. “Don’t you feel it, Perry, creeping in from all directions since the old king died? And it’ll get worse if Wellesley steps down for these reforming fellows—”

“Feel what?” Lord Derwent looked at him blankly.

“Dullness, respectability, worthiness and rampant hypocrisy! You can’t enjoy an evening in a hell without these new Peelers turning it over. And as for society—the most innocent flirtation sends young women into a simpering panic, and let slip the mildest oath and the mamas look at you as if you have crawled out of the midden! Conversation is all of profit and industry, new inventions and good works—everyone fancies themselves an archaeologist or scientist or writer—no one confesses to idleness or sheer self-indulgence any more. I begin to think old Bonaparte was right—we’re becoming a nation of shopkeepers with a tradesman’s morality—damnation, I am even beginning to feel that I should be doing ‘something useful’ with my life!”

“But you do…you do lots of things. You hunt and fish, and you’re damned good company at the club—”

“Amusements, Perry, that’s all,” Jonathan said gloomily. “Amusements of which I am beginning to tire.”

Lord Derwent’s brow furrowed. “Well, you’re a Member of Parliament. That’s useful, ain’t it?”

“Parliament! I rarely visit the place and I’ve made one speech in five years—and that was for a wager to see if I could make old Beaufort’s face go as purple as that young Jewish fellow’s waistcoat.”

“Caused more of a stir than most, though.” Derwent laughed. “When I read it in The Times, I thought you’d become a raving revolutionary. If every landowner gave land to his labourers for their use, we’d all be penniless and I doubt they’d bother to work for us at all!”

“One can hardly blame them,” Lindsay answered drily. “The price of bread is up, wages are down, and the common land has been fenced in for sheep. Their work is being taken by machines in the name of profit and the poor relief has been cut to subsistence.”

“Well, at least they’re spared all that nasty dusty work—and the farmers do well out of it,” Lord Derwent said lightly. “All the clever chaps tell me that the health of the nation is dependent upon the creation of wealth—”

“And also, it would seem, upon the creation of paupers,” Jonathan said glancing towards the pinched face of the child as they passed him.

“The lower orders have always gone without when times are hard, they’re used to it. A bit of hunger toughens ’em up and keeps ’em grateful for what they do get. They’re not like us, Jono, they don’t have the finer feelings—look out!”

But Lindsay had already reined back the bays almost to their haunches as they rounded another bend, made blind by the gable end of a cottage built into the wall, and almost collided with a pony trap slewed across its width.

There was no sign of its driver. The reins were looped loosely about the post of a small gate to one side of the cottage, and the skewbald pony was nibbling at a weed growing in a crack in the wall.

“Damned silly place to leave it!” Derwent announced loudly. “All Curzon Street to ninepence that it’s driven by a woman.”

“The Rector’s wife or daughter, I’d wager,” Jonathan agreed wryly, glancing at the weathered straw hat with a plain ribbon trim that lay discarded upon the seat of the trap. “Calling upon the downtrodden and irreligious with some tract, no doubt. Jump down and move it, would you, Perry? Or we’ll be here all day. There’s a field gate a bit further on—put it in there while I pass—”

“Must I?” Lord Derwent looked down doubtfully at the chalky mud of the lane. “It took my man hours to get this finish on my boots.” His face brightened as he noticed that the tiny downstairs window of the cottage was open and leant across to pick up the whip. “No need, watch!”

He stretched out the whip and rapped upon the window sill. “I say, you there, would you like to earn a shilling—?”

“Go away! Go away!” A woman’s voice, choked with sobs, replied. “You’re murderers! All of you!”

“Murderers! I assure you, we are no such thing!” Perry shouted back cheerfully. “All we want is for someone to move this trap—surely you have a good strong lad—”

The woman’s sobs became a low keening wail.

There was a bang as a door was thrown open. A moment later, Janey was at the gate. Tall and slender in her grey gown and white apron, she glowered up at them, as she settled a grubby-looking infant more firmly upon her hip.

“Can you not just go away?” The voice was low, educated and furiously angry with the faintest of accents, which puzzled Lindsay for a moment. He had heard that accent before, but where? His brows furrowed for a moment. And then he remembered. Jack de Lancey, the young American officer who had served on Wellington’s staff at Waterloo before being mortally wounded.

“Whatever is the clergy coming to? She sounds like a colonial,” Perry hissed in an all-too-audible whisper at the same moment.

“Perhaps that is because I was born in America and spent the first sixteen years of my life there,” Janey snapped. She was in no mood for condescension from a pair of aristocratic dandies who were probably incapable of tying their own cravats. “Now, if your curiosity is satisfied, will you please go away!”

“With pleasure,” Lord Derwent moaned, “but this—” he wrinkled his nose distastefully as he gestured to the trap “—this vehicle is in our way.”

“You have my permission to move it!” she retorted, brushing back a strand of dishevelled fair hair from her face with her free hand. “Unless you would prefer to hold the child? I thought not!” she said scathingly as her hazel eyes blazed across Derwent’s horrified face. “It might spoil your gloves!”

“But surely there is a lad—” Derwent said.

“Not any longer! You hear that woman weeping—she has just heard that ‘her fine lad’ is to be hanged for the firing of a rick, which he was not even near—”

“Hanged! Bigod!” Lord Derwent’s fair brows lifted. “Damned inconvenient timing, but I suppose he deserves it.”

“Deserves—” Her voice came out of her throat as a hiss of contempt. “Do you think anyone deserves to die for the price of a hayrick, when his employer is a mean-minded cheat who will let men, women and children starve to death? Is hanging a just punishment for such a crime?”

“Should have thought of that before he set fire to the rick. Common knowledge that arson’s a capital offence,” Lord Derwent drawled.

“He did not fire the rick!” Janey found herself almost choked with rage. If they did not go soon, arson would not be the only capital offence to be committed of late. She could easily murder the pair of them. “I do not know how you can be so complacent! So arrogant!” she said fiercely.

“Quite easily, really. Someone has to support the rule of law, you know.”

“The trap, Perry?” Jonathan interposed quietly, speaking for the first time when he saw Janey’s free hand clench upon the crossbar of the gate as if she were intending to rip it off and hurl it at Derwent like a spear. “Now, if you would not mind?”

“Must I?” His companion’s answer was one sharp glance that sent Lord Derwent down from the box in a moment.

The hazel eyes followed Derwent, and the soft rose lips silently framed an epithet that the Honourable Jonathan Lindsay had never heard from a lady, and certainly not from a Rector’s wife. His cool blue gaze flicked to the hand she had put up to push away another stray strand of hair from her eyes, leaving a smudge of soot upon her slanting cheekbone. No ring upon the slender fingers—the daughter, then?

A pity, he thought. With her great angry dark eyes, slanted dark brows and wide, soft mouth, she was all passion and fire, a veritable Amazon. Quite unlike the insipid blue-eyed misses who were English society’s current ideal, but put her in Paris and she’d have ’em falling at her feet. If she had been married, country life might have proved more entertaining than he had expected, but he had a rule of never seducing unmarried girls. There were some depths to which one could not sink, even to relieve boredom.

And then, with a start, he realised that those extraordinary hazel eyes were fixed upon his face, regarding him with a coolness that he found distinctly disconcerting. He was not accustomed to women looking at him as if he had just crawled from beneath a stone. Possessed of a large fortune, and good looks since the age of sixteen or so, he had always been the recipient of frank admiration, dewy-eyed adoration or thinly veiled invitations from females of all ages.

“Lord Derwent is not as unkind as he sounds, I assure you,” he said, wondering why that cool dark gaze should make him feel as if he should apologise to her. After all, why should he care what she thought of him?

“No?” The fine dark arch of her brows lifted as she glanced to where Lord Derwent was somewhat ineffectively coaxing the unwilling pony away from the weed in the wall. “Perhaps I misjudged him…perhaps he is merely stupid.”

“Derwent is far from stupid. He is overly flippant at times,” he said tersely, knowing that it was equally true of himself. “It has been a habit of his for so long he no longer notices himself doing it.”

“Flippant!” Her voice was as contemptuous as her stare as she looked at him a second time, taking in the studied carelessness of his Caesar haircut, the immaculately tailored grey topcoat that emphasised the broad width of his shoulders, leanness of his waist and hips, the glossy perfection of riding boots that did not often have contact with the ground. “If you think that an excuse, then you are as despicable as he is.”

Her gaze came back up to his, defiant and decidedly judgmental, he thought. She might as well call him a dandy and a plunger and have done with it as look at him in that fashion. Well, if that was how she wished it—

“Oh, no, I really cannot allow you to insult Derwent in such a fashion,” he drawled and returned her scrutiny with a blatancy which sent the colour flaring in her cheeks. “I’m worse, much worse, I assure you.”

“That I can well believe,” she replied, involuntarily lifting her free hand to the little white ruff collar at the neck of her grey gown to be sure it was fastened. And then, aware that his mocking blue gaze had followed the gesture, she let her hand drop swiftly back to her side and lifted her chin to glare at him again.

“But I do have my saving graces,” he said, drily feeling a flicker of satisfaction that he had succeeded in disconcerting her. “A sense of humour, for instance.”

“Really?” Her faintly husky voice was pure ice as her gaze blazed into his eyes. “I cannot say I find hanging a source of amusement.” Hitching the infant more firmly upon her hip, she made to turn away.

“Wait! My apologies. You are right, of course—hanging is no laughing matter.” He found himself speaking before he had even thought what he was going to say. “This lad who is to be hanged—if you tell me his name and circumstances, I might be able to do something. I cannot promise, of course, but I have some influence as a Member of Parliament.”

“You are a Member of Parliament?” There was astonishment in her voice and in the wide hazel eyes as she turned to face him again, and, he noted wryly, deep suspicion.

“Difficult to believe, I know, but it is the truth,” he drawled.

“For a rotten borough, no doubt,” she said, half to herself.

“Positively rank, I’m afraid. My father buys every vote in the place,” he taunted her lightly. “But the offer of help is a genuine one.”

She regarded him warily for a moment. There was no longer mockery in either the blue eyes or that velvety voice.

“You mean it?” she said incredulously. “You will try—?”

“My word on it,” he said, wondering how he had thought her hair was mouse at first glance. It was gold, he realised, as a shaft of weak sunlight filtered through the clouds. A warm tawny gold, like ripe corn under an August sun. And it looked soft. Released from that tight knot, he would wager it would run through a man’s hands like pure silk.

“His name is Jem, Jem Avery, he’s fourteen years old and he was sentenced at Salisbury Assizes, by Judge Richardson.”

Jonathan jerked his attention back from imagining the circumstances in which he might test his own wager and gave her his full attention. “Fourteen? That does seem harsh,” he said slowly.

“Yes. Fourteen. They seem to think that to make such an example will quell the discontent amongst the labourers and prevent it spreading to Wiltshire,” she said flatly, as his blue gaze met and held hers for a moment. “You really will see what you can do? You will not forget?”

“No. No.” He shook his head, quite certain that even if the unfortunate Jem slipped his mind, his advocate was not likely to do so for a week or two at least. “You have my word I will do what I can.”

“Why?” she asked suddenly. “You are a stranger here and can have no interest in what becomes of Jem.”

He shrugged his shoulders. “Must be my altruistic nature. I can never resist a distressed damsel, so long as she is passably pretty, of course,” he added self-mockingly.

“I am not distressed, sir! I am angry!” she snapped with a lift of her chin. “And neither am I passably pretty!”

“No,” he said, after a pause in which his gaze travelled over her face, taking in the breadth of her brow, the fine straight nose that had absolutely no propensity towards turning up, the clean, strong upward slant of her jawbone from the point of her lifted chin, and that wide, generous mouth, “you are not passably pretty.”

“I am glad you realise your error—” she began to say, wondering why she felt such a sense of pique.

“Any man who considered you merely passable would be lacking in judgement and taste,” he interrupted her lazily, his eyes warm and teasing as they met her gaze. And that was true, he thought, with a touch of surprise as his gaze dropped fractionally to the decidedly kissable curve of her mouth and then lower still to the perfect sweeping lines of her body beneath the plain grey gown.

Janey stared back at him. He was flirting with her. This laconic, drawling, society dandy was flirting with her! He was looking at her as if he wanted to kiss her, touch her…The image that arose in her mind was so shocking, so devastating, that she could do nothing for a second or so but stare back at him helplessly. And then, as the corners of his wide, clever mouth lifted imperceptibly, and the clear blue eyes dared her to respond, the breath left her throat in a small exasperated sigh.

“Have you no sense of propriety?” she found herself blurting out and then frowned as it occurred to her she had sounded all too much like Mrs Filmore.

“Afraid not,” he answered with a complete lack of apology. “I blame it upon a youth spent in hells and houses of ill-repute, not to mention the houses of the aristocracy and Parliament, of course.”

“Oh, you are quite impossible!” In spite of herself, in spite of everything, she found her mouth tugging up at the corners.

“You can smile, then?” he said lightly. “I was beginning to wonder if you considered it a sin.”

“No.” She sobered, feeling guilty that for a second or two she had almost forgotten Jem. “But I cannot say that I much in the mood for merriment at present.”

“No.” The hint of mockery, of invitation, left his face and voice as he glanced at the cottage. “That is understandable enough in the circumstances. You have not told me where I might send word. The Rectory?”

“No, Pettridges Hall,” she said with inexplicable satisfaction, having overheard his comments about the likely owner of the trap through the open cottage window. “I have no connection with the Rectory and no fondness for reforming tracts.”

“I am delighted to hear it,” he said without the slightest trace of embarrassment. “Especially since it seems we are to be neighbours. I have just become the new owner of Southbrook, which I understand borders the Pettridges estate.”

“You have bought Southbrook?” Janey’s face lit as she looked at him with unhidden delight. “That is wonderful!”

The dark brows lifted, mocking her faintly. “I am flattered by your enthusiasm to have me for a neighbour.”

“It is not for you in particular, sir, I meant merely that it is wonderful that Southbrook has been bought at last,” Janey said, and knew as she caught the flicker of amusement in the pale blue eyes that she had spoken just a little too quickly to be completely convincing either to him or herself. “The land has lain idle so long and there are so many men in the village who desperately need work.”

“I stand corrected,” he said drily. “Though I feel honour bound to confess that I did not buy the estate from any sense of philanthropic duty. I accepted it in lieu of a card debt after the owner assured me it was no longer his family home. We are on our way to inspect the property now.”

“Oh, I see,” she said, her voice flat again suddenly. “You are not familiar with the estate, then?” she asked, thinking that he and his companion would undoubtedly take one look and return to town forthwith, as had all the other potential purchasers.

“Not yet. Why?” he asked sharply. For a moment she considered warning him about the leaking roof, the broken windows, the last five years of complete neglect that had followed upon twenty of inadequate maintenance, but then she decided against it. There was always a chance that he might see beyond Southbrook’s failings to its original beauty and decide to restore the estate.

“Oh—no reason,” she replied, carefully giving her attention to the child in her arms who was beginning to grizzle and wriggle. “I’m sorry, what did you say?”

“I asked whom I should ask for?”

“Janey.” Stupidly, for no reason she could think of, she answered with the name with which she had been known to family and friends for the first sixteen years of her life. “Miss Hilton, Miss Jane Hilton, I mean,” she stammered slightly as the straight black brows lifted again.

“Jane,” he repeated it with a half-laugh. “Plain Jane.”

“Yes,” she said defensively. It was a jest she had endured more times than she could count from her guardian’s son and daughter. “What of it?”

“Nothing.” Again his narrow lips curved. “Somehow I did not think you would be an Araminta or Arabella, Miss Hilton.”

“Jono! Are you coming through or not?” Lord Derwent called impatiently.

“I must go. I think your trap would be better there by the gate, but if you wish—”

“No, your friend was right, it was a stupid place to leave it,” she admitted ruefully. “I was thinking only of how to break the news to Jem’s mother. I am sorry for the inconvenience.”

“It is of no consequence.” He smiled at her as he gathered up the reins. “Good day, Miss Hilton, I shall send word as soon as I can.”

“Thank you, Mr—” she began to say and then realised she did not even know his name.

“Lindsay,” he called over his shoulder as he sent the bays forward, “Jonathan Lindsay.”

She stood staring after him in disbelief. That was the Honourable Jonathan Lindsay? That laconic mocking dandy had made the passionate speech, demanding better conditions for the labouring poor that she had read in the paper? Surely not! And yet he had offered to help Jem, a boy he had never met.

For a moment, as she watched the phaeton disappear down the long winding lane, she felt like chasing after it and begging him to take on Southbrook. If she were honest, it was not only because a humane landlord would make such a difference to so many in the village, but because he had made her feel truly alive for the first time since she had arrived in England.

“Miss, miss…” The child who had been swinging on the gate came and tugged at her skirt. “Have you brought us something, miss? I’m hungry—”

“Yes, Sam. Some broth, some bread and some preserves,” she answered, still staring after the phaeton, “and some gingerbread, if you promise to be a good boy for your mother.”

She broke off, frowning as she watched the little boy who was already running for the door, his too thin arms and legs flying in all directions. Even with what she could persuade cook to let her have from the kitchen, they were not getting enough to eat, nor were at least half a dozen other families in the village.

As farm after farm took to the new threshing machines, there would be more men out of work this autumn—and she could do nothing, since she had no control of her estate, nor access to the fortune left her by her grandfather until she was twenty-one. And five months was far too long for Sam and the other families, who would starve and freeze this winter. There was nothing she could do, nothing—heiress she might be, but she was almost as powerless as poor Jem in his prison cell.

Biting her lip, she adjusted the child on her hip again as she limped slowly up the little herringbone brick path to the cottage door. As ever when she was tired, the leg she had broken a year ago had begun to ache. But there was no time to think of that now, not when Mrs Avery stood in the doorway, her face grey and desperate.

“He’ll be so scared, miss, so frightened,” the older woman blurted out. “I’d rather it was me than him.”

“I know,” she said helplessly.

“I’ve got to go to him, miss.” Mrs Avery caught her arm. “I’ve got to!”

“I will take you tomorrow, I am sure they will let you visit,” Janey said huskily as she guided the other woman back into the little dark room, where the other four Avery children were huddled upon the box bed, pale and silent. As she looked from one thin, pinched miserable face to another, the rage in her bubbled up afresh. If Jonathan Lindsay failed them, she would not let them hang Jem! She would not! Not even if she had to break him out of gaol herself.

Chapter Two

“Great God, Jono!” Lord Derwent broke the lengthy silence which had ensued after the phaeton drew up before the edifice of Southbrook House. “You took this in lieu of ten thousand? I should not give five hundred for the whole place! The park is nothing but weeds, the woods looked as if they had not been managed in half a century and as for this—” he gestured to the ivy-masked façade of the house “—look at it! There is not a whole pane of glass in the place, and what the roof is like I hate to think…”

“Perfect proportions, though,” Jonathan Lindsay said thoughtfully as he, too, surveyed the house. “See how the width of the steps exactly balances the height of the columns on the portico. Come on, Perry, let’s look inside now we’re here.”

Knotting the ribbons loosely, he leapt lithely down from the box.

“Do we have to?” Derwent groaned.

There was no answer. Jonathan Lindsay was already striding across the weed-choked gravel of the drive.

“You are not serious about intending to live here?” Lord Derwent pleaded an hour later, after they had inspected the house from attic to cellar. “It’s damp, dusty and—” he paused, shivering in his blue frock coat “—colder than an ice house in December.”

“Nothing that someone else’s industry will not put right,” his friend said absently, as he stared up at the painted ceiling of the salon adjacent to the ballroom. “This ceiling is very fine, don’t you think?”

“It might be,” Lord Derwent said unenthusiastically, “if you could see it for dust and cobwebs. I’m sorry, Jono, but I simply can’t understand why you would wish to reside here when Ravensfield is at your disposal.”

“I never shared my late uncle’s taste for Gothic fakery, you know that, Perry.”

“Yes, but it has every convenience, it’s in damned good hunting country and the agent runs the estate tighter than a ship of the line: you wouldn’t need to lift a finger from one year end to the next. Local society’s not up to much, I’ll grant you that, but it won’t be any different here.”

“Oh, I don’t know.” Jonathan smiled. “I thought the neighbourhood showed some promise of providing entertainment.”

“You mean that extraordinary young woman?”

“Ah, so you thought she was extraordinary, too,” he said, as he began to walk slowly back towards the entrance hall.

“Extraordinarily rude,” Lord Derwent replied huffily. “It is scarcely my fault some idiot boy is going to get himself turned off, but she looked at me as if she’d have preferred to see me in a tumbril on the way to Madame Guillotine.”

“I’m sure you misjudge the fair maiden—I think she’d have settled for a horse whipping,” Jonathan said drily.

“I don’t!” Derwent said with feeling. “I can’t think why you offered to help.”

“No, not like me, is it?” Jonathan agreed, deadpan. “I must have succumbed to this fever for worthiness.”

“Succumbed to a weakness for perfect proportions, more like,” Derwent said darkly, “and I’m not referring to the portico.”

“Ah, Perry, you do know how to wound one’s feelings,” Jonathan said, grinning. “But you must confess, she was very easy on the eye.”

“And to think that, only two hours ago, you were telling me that you were going to give up women along with the tables.” Derwent sighed. “But I’ll wager you’ll get not that one past the bedroom door, Jono. These radical females are all the same—they only give their affections to ugly curates or longhaired poets who write execrable drivel.”

“No gentleman could possibly accept such a challenge.” Jonathan laughed. “So, what are your terms?”

“Triton against your chestnut stallion,” Lord Derwent said after a moment’s thought.

“Triton!” Jonathan’s dark brows rose. “I’d almost contemplate marrying the girl to get my hands on that horse before the Derby. Are you so certain of my failure?”

“Positive. I chased after a gal like that once. There I was, in the midst of telling her about my critical role in defeating old Boney and waiting for her to fall at my feet in admiration, and all she says is ‘Yes, but do you read the scriptures, Lord Derwent? Spiritual courage is so much more important than the physical kind, don’t you think?”’

“Poor Perry.” Jonathan sighed. “It must be a sad affliction to lack both good looks and natural charm—” He broke off, laughing as he ducked to evade a friendly blow from Derwent.

“And,” Derwent went on, “she’ll never forgive you for not saving her arsonist. You said yourself the local men were determined to make an example, so they’re not likely to listen to a newcomer to the district, not even you, Jono.”

“Who said anything about local men?” Jonathan smiled, a wide slow smile. “We are going to get some fresh horses, and then we’re going straight back to town and I am going to see the Home Secretary.”

“The Home Secretary! He wouldn’t intervene on behalf of an arsonist and thief if his mother begged him on bended knee. And you are not exactly in favour with the government after that speech—the front bench did not appear to share your sense of humour.”

“Oh, I think he’ll lend a sympathetic ear,” Jonathan drawled. “Remember I told you I was involved in a bit of a mill with the Peelers when the hell in Ransome Street was raided? Well, if I hadn’t landed a well-aimed blow upon one of the guardians of the law, our esteemed Home Secretary would have found himself in an extremely embarrassing situation.”

“Great God!” Derwent cried. “You mean you are going to blackmail the Home Secretary to win the admiration of some parson’s daughter! It’ll be you on the gallows next.”

“Blackmail—what an ugly word.” Jonathan grinned. “I’m just going to seek a favour from a friend. And she’s not the parson’s daughter, her name is Jane Hilton and she resides at Pettridges Hall,” he added, his grin widening.

“If she’s not a clerical’s brat, she must be a poor relation or a companion and they’re as bad,” Perry said huffily.

“You know the people at Pettridges?” Jonathan’s blue eyes regarded him with sharpened interest.

“Hardly describe ’em as acquaintances, but their name’s not Hilton, so she’s not one of ’em,” Derwent said lazily. “I met the offspring last season: sulky-looking lad who talked of nothing but hunting and a distinctly useful little redhead that Mama was doing her best to marry off before she got herself into a tangle of one sort or another. Now, what the devil was the name—ah—Filmore, that’s it. They must be comfortably off, though—Pettridges wouldn’t have come cheap. My father told me old Fenton never spared a penny when it came to improving the place.”

“Fenton? I don’t know the name.”

“Well, he was something of a recluse. He was a cloth manufacturer, worked his way up from millhand to owner and dragged himself out of gutter by clothing half the army and navy and, if the rumours were true, half Boney’s lot as well.

“By the Peace of Amien he’d made enough for a country estate and respectability, even had an impoverished earl lined up for his daughter. But she reverted to type and ran off with her childhood sweetheart, a millhand. Fenton was furious. He never saw her again and cut her off without a penny. Affair made him a laughing stock, of course, and he never made any attempt to take part in society after that.” Derwent sighed. “Damned waste of a fortune and a pretty face by all accounts. Wonder who did get his money? They say he had one of the biggest fortunes in Southwest England.” Then he brightened. “I think I might look into it, Jono. You never know, there might be a great-niece or something, and I might land myself an heiress.”

Jonathan laughed. “He probably left it all to the Mill Owners Benevolent Fund for Virtuous Widows, Perry.”

“Probably,” Derwent agreed gloomily. “I suppose it will just have to be Diana, then. My father has told me he wants to see his grandson and a generous dowry in the family coffers before next year is out or he will discontinue my allowances, and tell the bankers to withdraw my credit. You don’t know how lucky you are being the youngest son and possessing a fortune to match those of your brothers—it spares you no end of trouble.”

“Yes,” Jonathan said beneath his breath, “and leaves you no end of time to fill.”

Janey sat in the window-seat of the morning-room, the copy of Cobbett’s Register in her lap, still at the same page she had opened it at half an hour earlier. She stared out at the gravelled sweep of drive that remained empty but for the gardeners, raking up the fallen leaves from the beeches that lined the drive. Surely Mr Lindsay would send word today, even if he had been unsuccessful. It was eight days now, and time was running out. In five days’ time Jem would be led out from Dorchester Gaol and hanged.

She dropped her eyes unseeingly to Mr Cobbett’s prose. At least she had not told Mrs Avery, at least she had not raised false hopes there—

“Jane! Have you heard a word I have said?”

She started as she realised that Annabel Filmore had entered the morning-room. “I’m sorry,” she said absently, “I was thinking.”

“You mean you had your head in a book as usual,” the red-haired girl said disparagingly as she studied her reflection in the gilt-framed mirror above the mantelpiece. “Mama says so much reading and brainwork ruins one’s looks,” she added as she patted one of her fat sausage-shaped curls into place over her forehead.

“You need not worry, then,” Janey said, not quite as quietly as she had meant.

“I have never had to worry about my looks,” Annabel said blithely, utterly oblivious to the insult as she turned upon her toes in a pirouette to admire the swirling skirts of her frilled pink muslin. “Just as well, with Jonathan Lindsay coming to live at Southbrook.”

“He is coming!” Janey’s face lit up. “When?”

“Oh, in a week or two, I think Papa said,” Annabel replied carelessly still admiring herself in the glass.

“A week or two!” The brief flare of hope she had felt died instantly. A week and all would be over for Jem. No doubt the promise had been forgotten as soon as made. So now what was she to do?

“Yes, but whatever has Jonathan Lindsay to do with you?” Annabel asked, suddenly curious as she turned to look at Jane. “You have gone quite pale.”

“Nothing, I met him in Burton’s Lane a few days ago,” she said tersely, Mr Cobbett’s Register fluttering unnoticed from the lap of her lavender muslin gown as she got to her feet. “That’s all.”

“That’s all!” Annabel’s blue eyes widened in exaggerated despair. “You meet the most handsome man in England in Burton’s Lane and you did not say a word to anyone!”

“I did not think him so very handsome,” Janey said, not entirely truthfully. “He was a little too much of the dandy for my taste.”

“Not handsome!” Annabel groaned and flounced down upon a sofa. “When he is so dark, so rugged—and that profile! Why, he could be Miss Austen’s Darcy in the flesh.”

“That is not how I see him,” Janey said, half to herself, as an unexpected image of his face, chiselled, and hard, lightened only by the slant of his mouth and brows, and the lazy amusement in the cool blue eyes, came instantly into her mind. Oh, no, she thought, Mr Lindsay was definitely no Mr Darcy. He was far too incorrect—far too dangerous in every sense.

She doubted he was afraid of breaking conventions, or anything else for that matter. In fact, strip him of his dandified clothes and put him in a suit of buckskins and he would not have been so out of place among the backwoodsmen among whom she had grown up. Whether or not someone would survive on the frontier was the yardstick by which she always found herself assessing people; in Mr Lindsay’s case, she found her answer was a surprising “yes”.

“It’s so unfair that you had to meet him in Burton’s Lane instead of me,” Annabel complained as she toyed with one of the flounces on her gown. “You should have invited him back here. Do you have any idea of how hard I tried for an introduction when I was in Town last Season?” Then her sullen round face brightened. “Mama will not possibly be able to refuse to allow us to be introduced now he is to be a neighbour.”

“Your mother would not allow you to be introduced to him? Why ever not?” Janey asked, curious in spite of herself. The son of an Earl, even if he were the younger could usually do no wrong in the eyes of Mrs Filmore.

“Because of his reputation, ninny,” Annabel explained patiently, as if she were speaking to a child. “He is the greatest rake and gambler in England; at least, that is what Miss Roberts told Mama. She said that there were a dozen husbands with cause to call him out, if duelling had not been banned, and another twenty wives who would willingly give their spouses cause to do the same.

“And she told me that he quite broke Araminta Howard’s heart—and very nearly her reputation. Miss Roberts says he cares for nothing but his pleasure—” Annabel’s lips parted upon the word and she gave a little shiver.

“I can scarcely believe that of the man who made the speech that was printed in the paper,” Janey said, feeling a peculiar distaste about hearing of Jonathan Lindsay’s apparently numerous amours.

“The speech about the poor!” Annabel gave a shriek of laughter as her brother entered the room, and came to lounge sullenly against the mantle. “Piers! Piers! Jane admires the speech Jonathan Lindsay made on behalf of the poor.”

“Then, once he has settled in, we must be sure to call so she can congratulate him in person,” Piers drawled, an unpleasant smile on his rather too-plump mouth. “I am sure he will be delighted with her admiration.”

“Oh we must—we must—” Annabel spluttered into helpless incoherent laughter.

With a resigned sigh, Janey bent to pick up the Register and made to leave.

“Where are you going, dear coz?” Piers stepped in front of her.

“Somewhere a little quieter,” Janey said, staring back into Piers’s rather bulbous pale blue eyes. “Will you stand aside, please?”

“Papa wants you in the library,” Piers answered without moving. “He is none too happy about the food you’ve been doling out in the village. Quite choleric, in fact, says he won’t have the estate’s money wasted upon the undeserving poor who do no work.”

“And yet he does not mind keeping you in funds,” Janey said mildly.

“I am not poor,” Piers said frostily, his heavy features taking on an expression of hauteur.

“Undeserving was the adjective I had in mind.” Janey smiled. “Now let me pass, if you please. Perhaps you can convey my apologies to your father? I have other more pressing matters to attend to this morning.”

“Like reading this insurrectionist rubbish!” Piers snatched the Register from her, crumpled it into a ball and threw it into the fire.

“How dare you!” Janey hissed. “That was mine, you had no right—”

“I had every right, dear coz,” Piers sneered, catching her arm as she went to turn away. “You know Papa will not have that paper in the house. And now you are coming to the library, as Papa wishes.”

“Let go of me!” Janey said warningly.

“No.”

“Very well.” Janey brought her knee sharply upwards in a manoeuvre which no well-brought-up young English lady would have known.

There were definitely some advantages in a frontier upbringing, she thought, as she saw Piers’s eyes bulge, and he crumpled into a groaning heap upon the floor.

“Jane! What have you done? You have killed him!” Annabel flew to her cursing brother’s side.

“I fear not,” Janey said unrepentantly. She picked up her shawl from the window-seat and turned for the door, a smile upon her lips. A smile that froze as she found herself looking over her guardian’s shoulder, straight into Jonathan Lindsay’s blue eyes.

How long he had been there, what he thought of her after the scene he had just witnessed, were of no consequence for the moment in which their gazes locked. She only knew that she felt a ridiculous surge of happiness that he had not forgotten his promise to her. He had come.

“Jane!” Mr Filmore, who had seemed transfixed, apart from the trembling of his moustache, finally found his voice in a tone of thunderous disapproval. “I cannot think what you have to smile about! Brawling like some tavern slut! Has the money your grandfather spent upon your education, the effort Mrs Filmore has expended, counted for nothing?”

Janey made no answer, but stood, head held high, her gaze fixed upon a point somewhere over the rather short Mr Filmore’s head. She had a very good idea of how the conversation would progress. Mr Filmore never lost an opportunity to remind her of her failings, her lack of gratitude for the belated, but expensive, education lavished upon her by her grandfather.

Or the fact that she had been discovered, at the age of fifteen, living in a boarding house in the care of a woman who thought little of hiring herself out along with the beds, a woman who taught her the very useful manoeuvre she had just tried out on Piers. And upon receipt of that information, Jonathan Lindsay would no doubt decide to discontinue their acquaintance at the earliest opportunity, she thought, her happiness evaporating into a sudden bleak emptiness.

“Have you ever had the misfortune to witness such behaviour before, Mr Lindsay? I should wager you have not!” Somewhat to Janey’s surprise, Mr Filmore turned to address his visitor before berating her further.

“No.” Mild contempt edged Jonathan Lindsay’s voice like a razor. “But then, neither have I seen such provocation before, being accustomed to the company of gentlemen.” He looked pointedly at Piers who, after being assisted to his feet by his sister, strode out of the opposite door without so much as a word to any of them.

Janey’s hazel gaze flashed back to his in grateful astonishment. She had not expected to find an ally in the aristocratic Jonathan Lindsay.

Holding her gaze, he gave her the briefest of smiles. A smile that made her heart stop and skip a beat. Suddenly, the imminent lecture to be endured did not seem such an ordeal.

“If you knew my ward, sir, you would know my son is blameless in this matter,” Mr Filmore said huffily. “We make allowances, of course—she has never been quite herself since her betrothed died so tragically last year.”

“Allowances!” Janey’s hazel eyes took on a greener hue as her temper rose.

“Jane,” Mr Filmore said firmly, “do not let us have another scene. You do not want Mr Lindsay to think you unbalanced, do you?”

“That is not an error I am likely to make,” Jonathan said coolly. “In my opinion, Miss Hilton is perfectly balanced.” He put the slightest emphasis upon the last word, and Janey felt her insides contract as his blue gaze skimmed downwards from her face to the sharp curve of her waist emphasised by the tightly fitting bodice of her lavender gown. “And it is a delight to see her again.”

“Again?” Mr Filmore said, looking down his sharp thin nose. “I was not aware you had been introduced, Jane.”

“We met by accident, last week,” Janey said dragging her gaze from Jonathan Lindsay’s face. A delight. Was that true?

“In Burton’s Lane,” supplied Annabel with deliberate malice. “That’s where the family of that boy who fired the rick live.”

“Not for much longer, if I have anything to do with it.” Mr Filmore was curt, disapproving. “I might have known you were gallivanting about the countryside again, dispensing largesse to all and sundry.” He drew himself up. “If it were not for me, Mr Lindsay, Miss Hilton would not have a penny of her money left by the time she is of age.”

“Oh, Papa, I am sure Mr Lindsay does not wish to be bored with our little domestic disagreements.” Annabel came forward, all smiles, swaying flounces and bouncing curls, as Janey stood, momentarily stricken, wondering whether Mr Filmore could evict Mrs Avery without notice. “And you have not introduced me yet.”

“There is hardly any need,” Jonathan said, with a smile that did not reach his eyes. “I know you by sight, Miss Filmore, and by reputation.” His mouth curved a little upon the last word. “You were in Town last Season, were you not?”

“Yes, how clever of you to remember,” Annabel simpered, fluttering her eyelashes. “I did not think you would have noticed me amongst so many.”

“Oh, you are impossible to ignore, Miss Filmore,” Jonathan said drily as his eyes flicked over the pink frills. “Quite impossible.”

“Oh, Mr Lindsay, you are such a flatterer,” Annabel said, twirling one of her red curls coyly about her finger. “Is he not shameless, Jane?”

“Utterly, I fear,” Janey agreed mildly, the corners of her mouth curving in spite of everything. Only Annabel, whose vanity was overwhelming, could possibly have taken what he had said as a compliment.

“Jane,” Mr Filmore said frowningly, as he glanced from Lindsay to Janey, “have you entirely forgotten your manners? Go and order some refreshment for our guest.”

“Of course,” Janey said demurely. “If you will excuse me?” She waited for Jonathan Lindsay to step aside.

“A moment, Miss Hilton.” He touched her arm as she made to pass him, stopping her in mid-stride. She stared down at his long elegant fingers, so brown and firm upon her thin muslin sleeve just above her wrist. It was the lightest, politest of gestures. There was no need for her pulse to beat wildly at the base of her throat, no reason at all for her breath to stop in her throat. And it was ridiculous to have this feeling that her whole life had been leading to this moment, this man’s touch upon her sleeve.

Dragging in a hasty breath, she jerked her gaze upwards to his and found him staring at her speculatively.

“Yes?” Her voice was almost, but not quite, as steady as she would have wished it as his gaze held hers and she caught the gleam of amusement in the indigo depths of his eyes. No doubt he was used to women reacting to him in such a fashion and that piqued her. She did not want to be like the rest…not to this man.

“That matter we spoke of—”

“About the gardens of Southbrook, you mean?” she interrupted him warningly, willing him with her eyes to understand that she did not want Jem’s case mentioned before Mr Filmore.

“Yes,” he said after a fractional hesitation, “the gardens.”

“You will find the camomile seat at the foot of the waterfall,” she went on hastily. “Sunset is the best time to sit there, the light turns the water to rainbows—” She stopped, as close to blushing as she had ever been, as his brows lifted quizzically and he smiled at her in a way he had never done before, a wide slanting smile that reflected the warmth in his gaze.

“Rainbows at sunset?” he said with gentle mockery. “How very romantic for a Radical.”

“It was merely an observation—you really do get rainbows—” she said tersely as Annabel giggled.

“Then I shall go there this very evening.”

She exhaled with relief as he lifted his fingers from her arm. He had understood. But then he understood everything far too well, she thought wryly as she took a step back from him.

“Rainbows!” She heard Annabel snort as she left the room. “I swear Jane is becoming more fanciful by the day.”

Chapter Three

The orange disc of the sun was just slipping below the distant horizon of the downs when Janey stepped out of the woods. A few feet ahead of her was an apparently sheer cliff, out of which sprang a small torrent of water, which foamed and sparkled as it tumbled into the shadowy pool some forty feet below. Above the noise of the water, she could hear the frantic excited barking of a dog; glancing down to the edge of the pool, she saw Jonathan Lindsay, throwing sticks for his liver and white spaniel into the calm end of the pool.

Cautiously she began to descend the narrow zigzag of a fern-lined path that threaded down the cliff, thinking ruefully that it would have been easier if she had been as close a follower of the fashions as Annabel and, hence, would have been wearing a skirt that skimmed her ankles rather than the ground.

The roar of the falling water drowned out the noise of her approach. It was the spaniel who sensed her presence first, dropping its stick at Jonathan’s feet and raising its head to bark furiously.

“Hello! I was beginning to think you were not coming, or I had misunderstood you,” he called up to her as he turned.

“No, you understood perfectly,” she shouted back, wondering why it was that seeing him should give her this peculiar feeling of instant well-being. “I am sorry to have kept you waiting,” she said as she drew nearer, “it was more difficult than I had expected to get away.”

“You are still in disgrace, I take it?”

“For all eternity, I suspect,” she said with feeling, her guardians having waxed long and lyrical about her outrageous behaviour.

“Wait, I’ll help you—the path has collapsed there.” He came forward, hands outstretched to help her down the last drop of two feet or so.

“Thank you,” she said after a fractional hesitation, and put out her hands to rest them on his shoulders as his hands closed about her waist. It would have been ridiculous to refuse. As ridiculous as it was to feel so afraid of touching him. Daniel had lifted her down from a thousand such places when they had roamed the great forests on the long trail west, looking for firewood and berries.

“Ready?”

“Yes…” The word dwindled to nothing in her throat as she glanced down into his blue, blue eyes and everything seemed to stop: time, her heart, her lungs—even the roaring, cascading water.

For a second, no more, he stared back at her. Then, with a flicker of a smile, he lifted her down. Staring at his snowy linen cravat, she waited for him to release her waist, and then she realised that he could hardly do so until she removed her hands from his shoulders, where they seemed to have become fixed.

Snatching her hands back, she pulled out of his grasp, took two steps back and dragged in a breath. She had danced with several men, even been kissed upon the mouth once by Daniel, but she had never, ever felt anything like that sudden irrational sense of belonging, of wanting to touch, hold on and never let go—

Get yourself in hand, girl, she told herself impatiently, as he regarded her a little quizzically with a half-smile hovering upon his wide mouth. Sure, he was handsome, but he had not found their proximity in the least bit earthshaking—but then, no doubt, he was used to simpering society misses falling at his feet. She took another breath and lifted her chin, preparing to be as cool, as ladylike and as English as she knew how.

“Do you always look at man like that when he touches you?”

His dry question almost made her gasp. No one she had met since she had come to England had ever been so direct, so outrageously intimate. How dare he ask such a thing! And then she almost laughed—if he wasn’t going to play by society rules, then neither was she…she would be what she was, a colonial who did not know how to behave properly.

“Only when they have dishonourable intentions.” She gave him a blithe smile as she spoke and had the satisfaction of seeing surprise flicker across his face.

“Alas, you know me so well already.” He inclined his head to her, his blue eyes sparkling with laughter. “But at least you did not slap my face; I suppose I should be grateful for that.”

“I have never cared for overly trodden paths,” she said as they walked side by side towards the camomile seat.

“Oh, sharp, sharp, Miss Hilton, I am wounded to the quick.” He put a theatrical hand to his breast.

“Not so much as Piers was,” she said sweetly, thinking it would do him no harm to be reminded that she was very capable of defending herself.

“True,” he agreed wryly, and then frowned. “You are limping. Have you hurt yourself?”

“It’s nothing. I broke my leg in a fall almost a year ago and it still aches sometimes,” she answered, as she sat down gratefully upon the springy cushion of herbs.

“Horses can be dangerous beasts, can they not?” he said as he seated himself beside her. “I broke a collarbone once, and that took long enough to mend.”

“Yes.” She let his assumption go. She did not want to have to explain about the accident, or Edward, just now. She was having trouble enough coping with his disconcerting nearness and the knowledge that she was as susceptible as any society miss to Jonathan Lindsay’s very considerable charm.

“So is that why you like to come here often, because you do not care for the overly trodden paths?” he asked a moment later, giving her a sideways glance.

“How did you know I come here often?” She paused in the act of crushing a sprig of the camomile between her fingers, wondering if the herb’s calming properties would have any effect upon her heart, which had begun to race from the moment he had sat down beside her.

“This—” he patted the springy camomile, his fingers a scant half-inch from her thigh “—has no need of weeding, someone has been doing it, and—” he reached into his pocket with his other hand and produced a glove worked with the initials J.H. “—I found this. You, Miss Hilton, have been trespassing for some time. Have you not?”

“Guilty, m’lud.” She released the breath that had caught in her throat as she accepted the proffered glove and his fingers momentarily brushed hers. “It was the one place I could be sure of escaping my guardians and—” she glanced across the pool and upwards to where the tall pines clung to the edge of the cliff above the waterfall “—there is something about it which reminds me of home.”

“Home?” His straight brows lifted as he looked about him, from the sparkling spill of water to the wild untidy tumble of ferns, brambles and once-cultivated shrubs, long since gone wild. “I cannot say this puts me in mind of the grounds of Pettridges Hall.”

“I meant America,” she said, still staring across the pool. “This reminds me of the Kentucky Trail and where we settled in Minnesota. Sometimes, sitting here watching the water and listening to the wind in the trees, I can almost believe I am back there—that if I turn around quickly enough I will see my father hitching up the team or my mother coming out of the cabin to call us in for dinner—” She broke off, wondering why on earth she was confiding such thoughts to him.

“You miss your life there?” There was the faintest note of surprise in his voice. A note she recognised all too well in carefully educated English voices, when she made the mistake of speaking about her past.

“Yes, I do,” she said with a sharp lift of her chin, telling herself that she was a fool to think that he might be different from the rest, that he might just understand. “America has a great deal to recommend it. England does not have a monopoly upon natural beauty, Mr Lindsay.”

“While you are resident in England, that is a subject upon which I shall have to disagree with you,” he said, bending down to pick up the stick that the ever-hopeful spaniel had dropped at his feet.

“Then I suppose it would be churlish to argue—” she said after the slightest intake of breath. “Do you always flirt so outrageously, Mr Lindsay?”

He straightened, threw the stick and then turned to look at her, his eyes sparkling. “Only with women whom I find interesting or desirable.”

“And into which category do I fall, Mr Lindsay?” she asked, surprising herself with the apparent uninterestedness of her tone.

“Both,” he said softly after a moment, his eyes suddenly very dark as his gaze dropped to her mouth, and then lower still to the fullness of her breasts. “Very definitely both.”

His voice had lowered to a velvety depth that made her skin prickle and grow tight, as if his hands had followed his stare, and she found herself staring back at his face, the wide slanting line of his mouth, his long clever fingers as he toyed with a piece of camomile.

Her mouth and throat grew dry as his gaze came back to her eyes and she knew that he meant it and that they had just stepped off the safe ground of lighthearted flirtation into some decidedly dangerous waters—for her, at least.

She swallowed and stared down at the glove in her hands. “Good,” she said, as matter-of-factly as she could manage. “I should hate to be merely desirable.”

He laughed, dissolving the tension that had been almost tangible. “I do not think you could ever be ‘merely’ anything, Miss Hilton.”

“You are doing it again,” she murmured, lifting her gaze to watch the spaniel heave itself out of the pool and shake the water from its coat.

“What?” he said innocently as he studied her detachedly, thinking that he had been right. She was not pretty: her fine nose was too straight, the upswept line of her jaw too clean and sharp, her forehead a fraction too high, her mouth too wide and feline. Oh, no—no insipid, dainty, English rosebud, this—more a lioness, lithe, fierce and very beautiful.

“Flirting,” Janey replied, putting a hand to her face, ostensibly to push back an errant strand of fair hair, but in reality to shield herself from the piercingly blue gaze that was making her feel decidedly uncomfortable.

“And you are not?” he mocked softly.

“No. I have no talent for it,” she said tersely, wishing that she were not quite so aware that, if she moved a matter of an inch, his shoulder would touch hers. “All I asked you—”

“—was whether or not I found you desirable?” He laughed. “If that does not constitute flirting, Miss Hilton, I don’t know what does.”

She shrugged, determined not to fall into another of his verbal traps as she glanced at him with what she hoped passed for indifference. “I was simply curious.”

“I should be happy to satisfy your curiosity whenever you wish.” He grinned at her and quirked a dark eyebrow. “You only have to say the word.”

He was wicked. Quite impossibly wicked, she thought, the corners of her mouth lifting despite all her efforts to look stern.

“The word is no,” she said a little too emphatically.

“Pity.” He was almost sober suddenly. “You would not reconsider if I told you your hair was the colour of gold, your eyes as dark and mysterious as that pool, that I shall die if I do not kiss you—”

“No!” She laughed, but got up abruptly and almost ran to where the dripping spaniel had dropped its stick, before adding, with all the lightness she could muster, “but before you expire, do tell me of any last requests and I shall be happy to see they are carried out.”

“Heartless—heartless,” he reproached her softly as he watched her bend lithely and throw the stick with an easy competency not often seen outside of Mr Lord’s new cricket ground. “How can you be so heartless at sunset, beside a waterfall of rainbows?”

“I daresay I have not read enough of the latest novels,” she said as she watched the spaniel plunge into the shallows of the pool again. “But it is beautiful, isn’t it? I shall miss coming here.”

“Why should you miss it? So far as I am concerned, you may come here whenever you wish.”

She started as his voice came from immediately behind her shoulder. He had moved as silently as an Apache warrior across the muddy grass until he was a scant pace behind her. She turned, and then wished she had not as he met her gaze. She felt her heart leap and race beneath her ribs as if she had suddenly found herself between a she-bear and its cub. It was ridiculous, she told herself, ridiculous to think he had meant that nonsense about kissing her, ridiculous as this soaring feeling of happiness because he seemed to like her.

“That is very good of you, but I should not like to intrude.” Her words came in a rush.

“I should count your presence an advantage rather than an intrusion.”

His voice was soft, warm, like his blue eyes as he sought and held her gaze. “So promise me you will come here again, whenever you wish?”

Annabel had been right, she thought wryly. He was seductive, far more dangerous than any of the trappers she had encountered while staying at Lilian’s boarding house in St Louis. And this was no polite invitation from one neighbour to another to visit his garden. Any well-bred young lady would refuse such an invitation without hesitation.

But then, she wasn’t a well-bred young lady, she was Janey Hilton, colonial and daughter of a millhand. And Janey Hilton was tired of a life that held no more danger and excitement than taking a fence on her horse…tired of trying to behave like an English lady and being constantly reminded that she had failed.

“Thank you, I will,” she said, holding his gaze steadily.

“You will? Alone?” He could not quite hide his surprise.

“Yes,” she replied with a calm that she was very far from feeling. “It is a very special place for me.”

“And for me—now.”

It was her turn to be caught off-guard by his sudden unexpected seriousness; she let her gaze drop to the ground.

“Why is it so special for you? Because it reminds you of home?” he asked as he, too, dropped his gaze, and flicked a stone into the water with the toe of his top boot. “Or did you meet with your betrothed here? No—don’t answer that,” he said as he heard her sudden intake of breath. “I had no right to ask such a question.”

“No, you did not,” she agreed, staring at the ripples that spread out from where the stone had sunk, wondering how they had come so far so fast. It was, she thought, as if they had known each other for years, not a few minutes.

“The answer is no,” she said quietly. “Edward would never have considered meeting me in such a place alone, even if I had suggested it—he would have considered it far too improper. He was always very concerned for my reputation. He was a curate and very principled.”

“They usually are, until it comes to getting a lucrative living or catching an heiress,” he said cynically.

“That is unfair. He was a good man. He did a great deal for the poor and he cared for me, not for my money, I am sure of it.” But was she? The words sounded hollow, even to her own ears. Of late, she had begun to wonder about Edward, wonder if he was all she had once thought him…wonder if he would have been so prepared to overlook her shortcomings, or quite so supportive of her efforts to improve conditions for the poorer families in the village if she had not been her grandfather’s heir.

“I am sorry,” he said as he watched her face. “Cynicism becomes something of a habit.”

“Like flippancy?” She gave him the ghost of a smile, remembering their first encounter in the lane.

“I am afraid so.” He smiled back at her ruefully. “But—”

“Jem!” she interrupted him sharply, horrified that for these few minutes she had forgotten the very reason she had come to meet him “Oh, have you had any success?”

“No, I am afraid not.” He looked away as he answered. “I had hoped to call in a favour from the Home Secretary and obtain a pardon for him, but—”

“He refused,” she said flatly. She had not realised, until this moment, just how much trust she had placed in him or how much she had hoped she would not have to put her other plan into action.

“Not exactly.” He shook his head. “The government fell shortly after I reached town. Wellington has resigned and, unfortunately, we have a new Home Secretary.”

“But couldn’t you ask the new Home Secretary?”

“Melbourne?” He shook his dark head a second time. “Lord Melbourne does not hold any affection for me. I was a friend of his wife, Caroline Lamb, and of Lord Byron, you see.” Then he gave a wry smile as he saw her blank expression. “You don’t see…you were probably playing with your dolls then.”

“I was more likely helping my mother deliver a neighbour’s child or my father harness the oxen,” she said shortly, feeling as if a chasm had suddenly opened up between them as she saw shock ripple across his face. She had been a fool to think him different, a fool to think that he might like the real Janey Hilton.

“I suppose it must be a very different life for young women who live on the frontier,” he said after a moment of silence.

“Different is something of an understatement.” She was brisk. The use of the word “women” rather than “ladies” had not escaped her after four years in England. “You have to grow up fast on the frontier, Mr Lindsay,” she added sharply, as he opened his mouth to say something. “Just as the sons and daughters of labourers must in this country. Now, if you will excuse me—” she turned abruptly from the pool “—I really must go back, before I am missed.”

“Wait!” He strode after her. “I did not mean to upset you and I am truly sorry I have not been able to do more for Jem.”

She stopped and turned to look at him, and to her surprise found that she believed him.

“It is not your fault.” She sighed. “And I am very grateful that you at least tried to help him. You haven’t upset me…it is not your fault that you are a—” She faltered, struggling for the right words.

“A patronising, arrogant society dandy who has never had to step outside of his gilded and well-padded cage?” His dark brows lifted quizzically.

“I should not have put it quite so rudely,” she said a little ashamedly.

“No, but you thought it.” He grinned at her.

“True,” she confessed ruefully, “and I apologise for it.”

“Then will you allow me the honour of escorting you home? It will be absolutely dark in the woods.”

“Oh, there is no need,” she protested politely. “I shall be perfectly safe. I am not afraid of the dark—it is not as if you have bears or Indians in England.”

“I insist,” he said and turned away momentarily to whistle to the spaniel.

“You insist?” Her brows lifted and so, for no reason, did her heart as he returned his attention to her. “Then I suppose I have no choice in the matter.”

“None,” he said, offering her his arm.

It was politeness, she told herself, as she put out her gloved hand and tentatively let her fingers rest upon the sleeve of his coat and they began to walk towards the cliff path, falling easily into step, nothing but ordinary politeness. There was no reason for her pulse to race, her heart to pound. No reason at all.

“No, Tess! Down!” His exclamation as they halted at the base of the cliff path came too late for her to avoid the spaniel’s enthusiastic greeting as it caught up with them and transferred a considerable amount of mud, water and pond weed from its coat and paws to the skirts of her black wool pelisse.

“I am so sorry—she’s still very young and gets rather out of hand,” he apologised. “Lie down, Tess!”

Tess shot off up the cliff path.

He muttered an imprecation under his breath and then turned to her. “I hope she has not done too much damage—I have a handkerchief somewhere.”

“It really doesn’t matter,” she said, laughing as she watched the spaniel turn and come back down the path again, so fast it turned a somersault at the bottom as it tried to stop at its master’s feet.

“Idiot dog!” He laughed, too, as Tess put her muzzle upon the toe of his boot and gazed up at him soulfully, the very picture of man’s loyal and obedient friend. “She was the runt of the litter and is terrified of guns. I should have knocked her upon the head at birth—still should, I suppose—”

“But you won’t,” she said with a certainty she did not stop to question.

“No.” He gave a half laugh. “As you have obviously perceived, a tender heart beats beneath this grim exterior.”

“I should not have called you grim,” she replied, giving him a brief sideways glance. “A little weathered, perhaps.”

“Thank you.” He inclined his head to her in a mocking bow. “Dare I allow myself to be flattered?”

“I do not think you have any need of my flattery. I suspect even the youngest son of an Earl receives more than enough.”

He laughed again. “That was definitely not complimentary, Miss Hilton, though I am afraid it was all too true. Have you always been so brutally honest with your friends?”

“Yes,” she said sweetly. “I find real friends always prefer honesty to pretence.”

He smiled and conceded her the victory with the slightest nod of his head. “I had better go first,” he said, gesturing to the rocky beginning of the cliff path, “then I can help you over the difficult places.”

“Thank you,” she acquiesced politely with a fleeting smile. She had climbed this path a hundred times without mishap and, in her childhood, rock faces as sheer as the one the water tumbled from, not to mention trees. Daniel had always got her to do the climbing when they had been looking for bird eggs—of the two of them, she’d had a better head for heights.

But that had been a different world, a different life, she thought, as he turned and held out his hands to her after scrambling over the first few boulders. English ladies were expected to be fragile, helpless creatures, and for once, as she put her hands into his and he smiled at her, she found she did not particularly mind furthering the illusion.

The path was steep enough to preclude much conversation and they climbed mostly in a companionable silence, with Tess padding quietly behind them.

He had been right. It was almost pitch black once they entered the woods. Out of old ingrained habit, she paused, listening and cataloguing the sounds in her mind and relaxing as she heard nothing but the natural chorus of the wood at night: the cooing of wood pigeons, the flutter and swoop of an owl, the squeal of a shrew and the rustle of leaves beneath Tess’s paws as she nosed around their feet, seeking a scent. It was only as she went to move forward again that she realised he had also halted and was listening.

“Sorry—” he turned his head to smile at her in the gloom “—I’ve never walked into a wood at night without stopping to listen since my troop was ambushed in Spain.”

“You were a soldier?” She was surprised. He was so unlike the army officers who dined with the Filmores from time to time.

“Briefly, in my misspent youth.” He shrugged as they walked on. “I did not particularly enjoy the experience. The Peninsular War was savage enough, but Waterloo—that was simply a slaughterhouse, and killed any remaining hankering to cover myself in military glory. I decided twenty was far too young to die and resigned my commission the moment we were sure Napoleon was beaten.”

“You were six years older than Jem is now,” she said flatly.

“I know.” The self-mocking tone left his voice. “And I wish to heaven there was something else I could do…I feel as if I have failed you.”

“No. No,” she protested, knowing she had been unfair. “At least you tried to do something for Jem, which is far more than I expected of a—”

“A worthless rake and a dandy?” he supplied wryly. “That is what you thought me at first glance, is it not?”

“At first glance, perhaps. But I could not count anyone who made the speech that you did to Parliament entirely worthless, Mr Lindsay.”

“Speech?” He looked at her blankly for a moment.

“The one defending the rights of the labouring poor.”

“Ah—” he stumbled suddenly upon a tree root “—that speech. There is something, perhaps, you should know—I am no radical, Miss Hilton. I sit on the Tory side.”

“Why?”

“Why?” He echoed her question in astonishment, as if he had never considered any other possibility. “Well, because my father did, and his before him, I suppose,” he said after a moment of silence.

“That’s the worst reason I have heard yet,” she said drily.

“Thank you,” he said with equal dryness.

She sighed. “Oh, well, I suppose it is not the label which matters, it is what you say. And you said all the things I should like to, except that you did it a great deal better than I ever could—”

“I doubt that. I suspect you would make a formidable advocate of any cause, Miss Hilton.”

She sensed rather than saw his smile in the gloom.

“And is that what you thought of me at first glance? That I was formidable?”

“No. My first thought was that I should like to take you to my bed.”

“Really, how strange…” she said after a moment, biting her lip to stop herself from laughing. He was impossible. Quite impossible. But did he really think he could shock her so easily when she had lived most of her sixteenth year in a St Louis boarding house?

“Strange?” He sounded faintly piqued by her reaction. “No man would think so, I assure you.”

“That was not what I meant,” she replied, after the most fractional of hesitations. “I thought it was strange because I was wondering whether or not I should like you to be one of my lovers.”

“One of your lovers!” He halted so abruptly that she found herself dragged backwards. “Great God, how many have you had?”

“Not nearly so many as you, I fear,” she lamented. “There are so few men that I find both interesting and desirable.” She could hardly keep the bubble of laughter out of her voice.

For a moment he stared down at her, trying to discern her face in the darkness, and then started to laugh. “I have just been hoist with my own petard, have I not?”

“You should not have tried to shock me,” she said as they started to walk on again.

“I am beginning to think that is impossible,” he said, shaking his head. “But, do you know, what shocks me most, Miss Hilton, is that you came to be betrothed to some milksop of a curate. What did the poor devil die of? Heart failure?”

“No.” Her expression became closed and the laughter left her face abruptly. “And he was not a milksop!”

“I am sorry.” He held her arm more tightly as she tried to walk ahead. “I did not mean to intrude upon your grief and I had no right to say that of a man I have never met.”

“No,” she said as they fell into step again, “you did not.”

“I suppose he would have helped you in your efforts to save Jem and succeeded, most like,” he said sourly, and then wondered what the devil was wrong with him to behave so mawkishly.

“I am sure he would have pleaded for Jem to be treated mercifully,” she said a little too quickly, then realised that she was not sure at all any more. There was something that nagged at her, something that had been at the edge of her mind since the day of the accident, but she could never quite remember what it was, what they had been discussing in the minutes before the staircase in the Tower had collapsed.

They walked on in an awkward silence, each sunk in their own uncomfortable thoughts. And then, quite suddenly, they stepped out of the darkness into the comparatively lightness of dusk that turned Pettridge Park to every hue of silver and grey.

By mutual, unspoken consent they both halted in the shadow of a large beech at the edge of the Hall’s garden. Pools of light shone out from windows of rooms in which curtains had not yet been drawn. Glancing up, she could see Mr Filmore, reading beside the drawing-room fire, Annabel playing the piano, and Piers leaning lazily across its lid.

“It does not seem you have been missed,” he said as a maid suddenly appeared at the window, and the scene was abruptly blotted out by a sweep of lined brocade.

“No,” she agreed succinctly as she remained staring at the curtained window.

He stared at her, studying her face in the dusk. For all her sharpness, her apparent self-confidence, her fierce honesty, she suddenly looked so very young, vulnerable, wistful and alone that he wanted to take her in his arms—though for very different reasons to those he had had until a moment or so ago. But now—now he was getting distinct twinges of conscience about his pursuit of Miss Janey Hilton, and about what the consequences might be for her.

“I had better go back,” he said. “Your guardians might think it a trifle odd for me to be walking alone with you in the dark.”

“They’d think you odd for choosing to walk with me at all.” She gave a slightly ragged laugh.

“Then they have no taste,” he said softly.

“All these compliments, you could turn my head, Mr Lindsay.” She strove to sound light.

“Like this?” He lifted a hand and placed his palm against her cheek, turning her face and tilting it upwards so she found herself staring into his shadowed face.

“I was speaking metaphorically,” she said a second—or was it minutes?—later. She did not know. She only knew that her face was burning beneath his hand, and that the world had seemed to stop again the moment he had touched her.

“Really? How stupid of me not to realise,” he mocked her softly and himself for being such a fool as to think she did not know the rules of the game. But there was no hurry, he told himself as his hand dropped away. Janey Hilton was like a rare vintage wine—she should be enjoyed slowly.

“You had better go in, Miss Hilton,” he said as she remained motionless.

“Yes,” she agreed, “but I cannot until you let go of my arm.”

“Of course,” he said, but still did not release her.

She swallowed. “Is there something else, Mr Lindsay?”

“Jem?” he said, not knowing where or how the sudden anxiety had arisen in his mind, but only that she had been too quiet upon the subject. “You have not any wild or reckless schemes for his rescue in mind have you?”

“No,” she said. It was not a lie. Wild and reckless simply would not do. It was going to take careful planning to save Jem. And a miracle to save herself from falling in love with Jonathan Lindsay.

“Good.” He exhaled and let go of her arm. “Because this is England, and in England, the rule of law is upheld mercilessly.”

“You need not tell me that,” she said, half-relieved, half-disappointed that he had believed her so easily.

“And neither need I tell you, I hope, that such strategies as exchanging clothes with the prisoner, or copying keys with wax and the like, only work in the pages of fiction.”

“I know.”

“Then I’ll say goodnight.”

“Goodnight.” She turned and began to walk towards the house.

“Wait!” he called softly after her. “How are you to get in?”

She stopped, turned and looked back at him. “Why, through the door, Mr Lindsay. You did not think I was going to climb the ivy in my petticoats, did you? If I had meant to do that, I’d have worn my buckskins.”

“Breeches?” He sounded shocked again, she thought with a smile.

“Buckskins are what the Indians wear, men and women—” she began to expound, and then laughed. “Never mind, Mr Lindsay, I’ll explain another time. Goodnight.”

“Goodnight, Miss Hilton.” His voice floated after her as she walked across the drive. And she was aware of him standing in the growing darkness, watching her, until the moment the great front door swung shut behind her.

She stood for a moment in the dimly lit hall, a half-smile on her lips. Worried as she was about Jem, and the estate, somehow, she had the absurd conviction that everything would be all right now Jonathan Lindsay had come to Southbrook.

Outside, at the same moment, Jonathan Lindsay frowned. He was feeling unaccountably guilty and it was not an emotion he was accustomed to. The trouble was, he liked Miss Janey Hilton, liked the way she looked at him, liked her cool directness and the way she smiled. He swore silently. What the devil was wrong with him? He was thinking like some greenhorn. She was just another woman, another conquest to be made…wasn’t she?

He turned away without answering his own question, whistled to Tess and strode back into the woods.

“Jane! There you are!” Mrs Filmore, her ample figure tightly upholstered in cherry silk, greeted Janey majestically from halfway up the broad flight of stairs. “I have been looking all over for you. Mr Filmore has relented. You may come down and join us—when you are suitably dressed, of course.” She frowned as she glanced derisively at Janey’s besmirched pelisse.

“I’d rather go to my room, thank you.” Janey gave Mrs Filmore her most benign smile. “I’ve been walking in the gardens and I am rather tired.”

“Walking alone in the dark!” Mrs Filmore gave a long-suffering sigh. “Really, Jane dear, you cannot go on like this. A little eccentricity in the first throes of grief is allowable, but poor Mr Grey has been dead almost a year now—though the ordeal you suffered would be enough to turn anyone’s mind.”

“There is nothing wrong with my mind.” Janey sighed as she began to climb the stairs. “And I should prefer it if you and Mr Filmore would stop implying that there is to anyone who cares to listen.”

“Well,” Mrs Filmore snorted, drawing herself up to her full, rather limited, height, “would you rather that I had explained to Mr Lindsay that your extraordinary behaviour this morning was learned from the female brothel-keeper with whom you lived for the year following your parents’ death?”

“Lilian was not a brothel-keeper,” Janey retorted. “She owned a boarding house.”

“A boarding house! A wooden hut where men drank liquor, and women sold their services.” Mrs Filmore gave a theatrical shudder. “If I had been your poor dear late grandpapa, I should never have brought you back here.”

“Sometimes, Mrs Filmore,” Janey muttered as she began to climb the stairs, “I wish that he had not.” But she knew that was not true, not any longer. It had not been true from the moment Jonathan Lindsay had first smiled at her.

“About time, Jono, where the devil have you been?” Lord Derwent said complainingly as Jonathan entered the library of Southbrook House. “This place is freezing, and I’ve been ringing for ages for your man to bring some more wood for the fire. Had to put some books on—only Mrs Radcliffe,” he added as Jonathan frowned. “Didn’t think you’d miss those.”

“Probably not,” Jonathan conceded, as he stepped up to the fire and held his hands out to the blaze, “but I’d rather you did not burn any more. The reason the servants have not answered is because the bell wires are all in need of replacement. You will have to go to the door and shout.”

“Shout? Didn’t think of that,” Lord Derwent grumbled, leaning back in a creaking chair upholstered with well-worn green leather and putting his feet up upon the brass fender. “And where have you been?” he asked as his brown gaze took in Jonathan’s muddy boots.

“Playing in the garden and walking in the woods,” Jonathan said with a grin, sitting down in the opposite chair.

“Playing in the garden! Walking in the woods on a November evening!” Lord Derwent scowled, his fastidious nose wrinkling as the wet and muddy Tess pushed against his boots in an effort to get closer to the fire. “And to think we could have been at White’s, or eating Wilkin’s steak and oyster pie.”

“Woods have their compensations,” Jonathan said, “in the very delicious shape of Miss Hilton.”

“What!” Lord Derwent’s feet dropped from the fender to the floor. “You’ve not had an assignation with Miss Hilton already! How the deuce did you manage that?”

“Very easily.” Jonathan laughed. “I do hope you’ve told your horseman to get Triton fit for me, Perry. Winning this wager is going to be easier than beating you at cards.”

“After you’ve failed to save her arsonist?” Lord Derwent shook his head. “I’ll believe it when I see it. A walk in the woods is one thing but—” he made an eloquent gesture “—is quite another.”

“I haven’t failed yet. We are going back to Town.”

“Hurrah!” Lord Derwent’s countenance brightened immeasurably.

“As soon as we have dined.”

“Tonight?” Lord Derwent groaned. “But it’s just started to rain.”

“There’s not much time and I want to see Caroline Norton.”

“Caro Norton.” Lord Derwent looked at him in surprise. “I thought it was all over between you years ago.”

“It was. But we have retained a fondness for one another.” Jonathan smiled. “Melbourne is besotted with her and, where he might not do me a favour—”

“He will do anything for the beautiful Mrs Norton,” Lord Derwent said slowly, “and Mrs Norton will do anything for you.”

“Exactly, Perry, exactly.” Jonathan laughed. “I don’t know why I did not think of it before.”

“Probably because you haven’t been thinking clearly since you first saw that female,” Lord Derwent muttered darkly. “If it wasn’t for her, you’d not have contemplated taking on this place for a moment.”

“What did you say?” Jonathan said, lifting his gaze from the flames of the fire into which he had been staring.

“Nothing.” Lord Derwent sighed dejectedly. “I’ll go and shout for Brown.”

Chapter Four

The chalky Roman road stretched like a pale ribbon ahead, in the pallid dawn light, as Jonathan Lindsay urged his tired horse on. The long ride from London had left him cold, hungry and impatient to see Jane Hilton’s face when he told her that he had succeeded in saving her arsonist.

He checked his horse as the road dropped steeply down into a hollow lined with hawthorns and scrub. He let the animal come down to a walk, glad of the respite from the biting wind that had cut through even his many-caped topcoat and caused him the loss of a new beaver hat. For a county so soft and pleasant in summer, Wiltshire could be damned bleak in winter, he thought, especially the edge of Salisbury Plain.

But then, as he rounded a sharp turn, all thought of the weather left his head. A fair distance ahead of him was a female rider, a rider he recognised more by instinct than any logic.

“Miss Hilton!” His shout was lost in the wind. For a moment, as she brought her horse to a halt, he thought she had heard him. But then, as he saw her dismount without so much as a glance behind her, he realised she was still oblivious to his presence.

“What the devil is she doing?” he muttered to his mount, which responded by coming to an uncertain halt itself.

He watched the distant figure with growing curiosity as she seemed first to address the hawthorns, and then cast her horse loose, shooing it away. Next she took off her hat, threw it down and stamped upon it, and then cast herself down upon the chalky road to lie prone across its centre.

And then from behind him, he caught the sound of hooves and the clatter of a carriage wheel borne forward by the wind. Looking back along the straight road, he saw a dark chaise, one which seemed to have more than its share of guards and bars upon its windows. He stared at it disbelievingly as understanding came with devastating clarity.

Prisoners were being transferred from Salisbury to Dorchester for the hangings, the chaise would already have slowed for the steep descent into the hollow, and would certainly stop at the sight of a lady, apparently having fallen from her horse. And the hollow was a perfect spot for an ambush with its high banks and ample cover. An ambush. No he shook his head at his own thought. He had to be wrong. Jane Hilton might have a strong sense of justice, but surely she would not be so reckless, so foolhardy, not for the sake of some poacher’s boy, would she?

He spurred his horse forward into a gallop as he answered his own question. The steep chalk track was slippery and he prayed his horse would keep its footing as it plunged and slithered towards Janey’s prone form.

Hearing the rapid approach of hooves, Janey shut her eyes, praying that the chaise would be able to stop in time. If it didn’t, it would run her over. But there was something wrong—the hoofbeats were far too light, too fast. There must be an outrider—why hadn’t she thought of that? Supposing his pistol had not come from the Salisbury Gaol’s armoury? She had been so sure she had arranged it so no one would get hurt.

She held her breath as she heard the horse and rider come to a slithering stamping halt upon the chalky mud, so near she felt the ground shake beneath her head as the rider dismounted. Then a moment later a hand was upon her arm, shaking her roughly, ignoring what she had hoped was a pathetic groan.

“Get up!”

She opened her eyes and stared in disbelief at the man bending over her. It was Jonathan Lindsay, his dark hair windswept, his eyes as dark a blue as his mud-bedecked top coat as he glared down at her.

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