A YEAR OF SCANDAL

A gentleman for every season

At the mercy of a ghostly matchmaker, four gentlemen must perform a shocking task. But claiming their inheritance might just lead them to the women who will steal their hearts!

Don’t miss this wonderful new quartet by Mills & Boon® Historical Romance author

Elizabeth Beacon

THE VISCOUNT’S FROZEN HEART

Already available

THE MARQUIS’S AWAKENING

December 2014

AUTHOR NOTE

Welcome to THE MARQUIS’S AWAKENING—and thank you for coming with me on my journey through A Year of Scandal.

As the seasons move into spring Tom Banburgh, Marquis of Mantaigne, finds more than he bargained for when he claims his once magnificent birthright at long last—I wanted Tom to have springtime as his season to have his life transformed by the most unlikely lady he’s ever met.

I hope you enjoy the adventures Lady Virginia left her four heroes in her will. Next it’s summer and autumn—but this is Tom’s book, and I can imagine him reading it with a cynical grin on his face, telling me I got that bit wrong and should have made him less handsome and his lady even lovelier. But I would never have got this far if it had been left to him, so just for once I intend to ignore him…

The Marquis’s Awakening
Elizabeth Beacon

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ELIZABETH BEACON lives in the beautiful English West Country, and is finally putting her insatiable curiosity about the past to good use. Over the years Elizabeth has worked in her family’s horticultural business, become a mature student, qualified as an English teacher, worked as a secretary and, briefly, tried to be a civil servant. She is now happily ensconced behind her computer, when not trying to exhaust her bouncy rescue dog with as many walks as the Inexhaustible Lurcher can finagle.

Elizabeth can’t bring herself to call researching the wonderfully diverse, scandalous Regency period and creating charismatic heroes and feisty heroines work, and she is waiting for someone to find out how much fun she is having and tell her to stop it.

Contents

Cover

Introduction

Author Note

Title Page

About the Author

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 Fifteen

Extract

Copyright

Chapter One

Tom Banburgh, Marquis of Mantaigne, thought the polite world was about to be bitterly disappointed. If the wolfish glint in Luke Winterley’s eye was anything to go by, he wouldn’t be letting the former Lady Chloe Thessaly out of his bed long enough for her to go to town for a very long time, so the ton wouldn’t be able to pass judgement on the new Viscountess Farenze until her new husband could spare her—some time in the next decade, if they were lucky.

‘Can’t this wait until after your wedding journey?’ he asked with a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach as Lady Chloe took a sealed missive from the neat reticule she was carrying. He should have been suspicious of that, since Luke was waiting to whisk her off on their bride trip and she hardly stood in need of whatever ladies carried in them when she had a husband all too eager to provide for her every need, and a few she probably didn’t even know she had right now.

Feeling a fool for not remembering his godmother’s infamous will, even on this joyous day Virginia had done so much to bring about, he realised he’d stepped into the book room with the happy couple as naively as a débutante at her first grown-up party. As if they would have anything else to say to him before they left for Devon on their honeymoon but here you are; you’re next.

‘Here you are; you’re next, I’m afraid, Tom,’ Chloe said with a rueful smile to admit he wouldn’t be pleased to take it and how could a few bits of expensive paper feel so heavy? ‘Luke says we won’t be back from Devon for weeks, and you must begin whatever you have to do for Lady Virginia before then if you’re to get it done in the allotted three months.’

‘Dash it all, though, it’s the beginning of the Season,’ Tom managed to utter after a heavy pause as he fought off a craven urge to throw the letter back at his best friend’s new wife and refuse. ‘Ah, well, suppose I might as well get it over with,’ he said as lightly as he could while turning the letter over again, as if he might conjure it into someone else’s hand if he put off reading it long enough.

‘Look what my quarter of a year brought me,’ Luke told him with a besotted smile Tom did his best to find nauseating.

‘And can you see me neatly paired off at the end of whatever wild goose chase Virginia insists I carry out for her?’ he demanded past a nasty little suspicion that was exactly what his wily godmother intended to happen, if Luke’s adventures were anything to go by.

‘One day you’ll have to consider the succession,’ Luke said half-seriously.

‘I have and decided there’s nothing very wonderful about the Banburghs, so who cares if there are no more of us?’ Tom replied with a cynical smile that felt a lot better than the dread of being the next one on his godmother’s list.

He ordered himself not to squirm under the sceptical mother’s glance Chloe had perfected on her young niece. She and Luke would no doubt raise repellent quantities of brats in their joint images and be blissfully happy together for the rest of their lives, but he had no wish to follow in their footsteps and had managed without a family all his life.

‘True,’ Luke agreed with an impatient glance at the door. ‘Why not leave him to read it in peace now, love? A very small part of me would like to stay and watch Mantaigne perform like a dancing bear in his turn, but the rest can’t wait for us to begin our honeymoon.’

‘I doubt your best friend relishes the task in front of him though, Luke,’ she told her new husband sternly, then seemed to find it impossible to see anything but him once she’d turned her fascinated gaze his way.

‘Have you any clue to what my quest could be, Lady Chloe?’ Tom asked to remind the lovers he was still here, before it was he who needed to leave the book room in a hurry instead of them.

‘Oh, that quest. No, I only hand out the letters,’ Chloe said with a shrug that admitted she was so deep in love with Luke they were very poor company.

She flicked a glance at Tom’s name and titles inscribed on his last message from his godmother and he was in danger of being ambushed by grief all over again. It was such a stark absence, having to acknowledge Virginia’s wit, warmth and energy had left this world for the next. She and Virgil had lit up his life, and he felt the loneliness of losing both hit him anew.

‘I had such plans, very seductive and beautiful ones they were as well,’ he grumbled to hide his true feelings on such a joyful day.

‘Rakehell.’ Luke dismissed that objection with the wolfish good humour of a man about to have his own wildest fantasies come true. ‘And where would be the fun in my great-aunt being predictable in death as she never was in life?’

‘Fun for you, I suppose, Romeo, now your task is safely over.’

‘True, watching you squirm is a pleasant side effect of standing at my own Lady Farenze’s side while I watch three more idiots run about in their turn. If Virginia can see us from her place in heaven, I bet she’s enjoying the view even more than I am right now.’

‘Knowing her, it won’t be some simple task easily got through and back to town before anyone misses me either.’

‘Oh, I suspect those seductively beautiful plans of yours will, but we have to leave, and you need to discover whatever it is Virginia wants you to do in private,’ the new Lady Farenze intervened.

‘The fun’s just starting—do we really have to go when it’s getting interesting?’ her lord said with the easy humour of a man whose task had come to a deeply satisfying conclusion.

‘We do, Luke Winterley,’ Chloe said with a severe look that only made him laugh.

Tom hadn’t seen his friend and honorary brother this carefree since he was a dashing and hopeful youth, always game for a lark. The marriage his father arranged when Luke was barely twenty certainly knocked the youthful high spirits out of him far too young and he’d turned into a virtual hermit when the silly chit left him. After that Luke had locked himself away in his northern stronghold to raise their baby daughter and Tom blessed Virginia for managing to chip Luke out of frozen isolation, but he didn’t want to be next the next victim on her list all the same.

‘Well, we’ll leave you to it then, Mantaigne. Try not to miss us too much, won’t you?’ Luke said with a mocking grin at Tom and a hot look at his lady that made her blush, then stride ahead of him, clearly in nearly as much of a hurry to begin married life as he was.

The door shut after them with a soft snick and Tom was left with the last letter he’d ever receive from his godmother, wishing she was here to tell him what maggot had got into her head this time herself. He’d spent the best years of his boyhood in this house and sometimes wondered if he had imagined his stark early childhood as the true lord of an ancient castle and vast estates, but master of nothing.

* * *

‘Bonaparte’s Imperial Guard could be marching about on the cliffs tonight and we wouldn’t be any the wiser.’

Polly Trethayne shook her head, then remembered her companion couldn’t see her in the heavy darkness. ‘I really think we would,’ she whispered, wishing her friend and ally had stayed inside. ‘If it is smugglers, we really need to be quiet.’

‘Better for us not to know when they’re out and about, if you ask me,’ Lady Wakebourne grumbled a little more softly.

‘I didn’t and we can’t simply sit back and let them use Castle Cove to land cargo whenever they fancy. The riding officers are sure to find out and report it, and the last thing we want is for the Marquis of Mantaigne to take an interest in Dayspring Castle for once in his life. He’ll turn us out to tramp the roads again without a second thought and leave the poor old place to go to rack and ruin.’

‘Even if he wants Dayspring to tumble down as the locals say, I’m sure he’d rather we stay than leave it empty for any passing rogue who wants a hiding place.’

‘One or two may already be doing that and we are the rogues as far as the rest of the world is concerned. No, long may he stop away,’ Polly argued.

Meeting Lady Wakebourne and finding this place abandoned on his lordship’s orders was a small miracle and Polly had prayed every night for the last six and a half years for the man to stop away. Even the memory of how it felt to wander the world with a babe in her arms and two small boys at her heels for six long and terrifying months made her shudder.

‘I doubt if anything would wrench him away from the delights of a London Season at this time of year, so I don’t suppose we rogues need worry,’ Lady Wakebourne whispered with an unlikely trace of regret.

Polly shook her head at the idea her practical and forthright friend secretly dreamed of playing loo and gossiping with the tabbies and dowagers of the ton, whilst the glitter and scandal of soirées and balls played out round them. Deciding she must be a freak to think the whole extravagant business sounded appalling, she wondered fleetingly how she’d have fared in that world if she had been obliged to make her come out in polite society. The idea was so far removed from her real life it made her want to laugh, but she bit it back and reminded herself this was serious.

‘Surely you heard that?’ she whispered urgently, listening to the night with the uneasy feeling it was listening back. ‘I’d swear that was a window opening or closing on the landward side of the house.’

‘The wind, perhaps?’

‘There is no wind; nothing ought to be out here but foxes or owls.’

‘Some poor creature could have got in and not been able to get back out, then,’ Lady Wakebourne murmured.

‘I refuse to believe bats and birds can unbar shutters or open windows,’ Polly said as lightly as she could when this black darkness made her want to shout a challenge at whoever was out there.

‘Tomorrow we’ll go in and see for ourselves, but if you take another step in that direction now I’ll scream at the top of my voice.’

‘They will be long gone by then,’ Polly argued, although she knew Lady Wakebourne was right and she couldn’t afford to encounter an unknown foe in the unused parts of the castle.

Her three brothers had to grow up and be independent before she was free to have adventures, but it was so hard to fight her wild Trethayne urges to act now and think later. At least memory of her father’s recklessness reminded her to leash her own though; she was all that stood between her brothers and life on the parish, if they were lucky, and she had no plans to leave any of them in the dire situation Papa’s death had left her in as a very naive and unprepared seventeen-year-old.

‘At least we’ll find out if these felons of yours exist outside the pages of a Gothic novel. If they do we’ll have to get them to believe there really are ghosts at Dayspring Castle and leave us in peace with them.’

‘Perhaps I should cut my hair and borrow a fine coat, then ride up the drive and announce myself as the Marquis of Mantaigne come back to claim his own,’ Polly suggested as the most absurd way of scaring anyone out of the old place she could think of.

‘And perhaps you should stop reading those ridiculous Gothic novels the vicar’s sister passes on to us when she knows them by heart.’

‘Aye, they’re about as likely to come true as the idea Lord Mantaigne will ever come here without being kidnapped and dragged up the drive bound and gagged first. So ghosts it will have to be then,’ Polly agreed, reluctantly admitting there was nothing to be done tonight, and followed her fellow adventuress back to the castle keep and the closest thing she had to a home nowadays.

* * *

‘I should have sent the butler and housekeeper from Tayne on ahead of us, Peters. At least they might have found a few rooms at Dayspring undamaged after all these years of neglect and managed to make them habitable for us by now.’

Tom halted his matched team of Welsh greys at the gatehouse and wished himself a hundred miles away. Dayspring Castle was puffed up as his most splendid country seat in the peerages and guides to the county, but he felt a clutch of sick dread in his belly at the mere sight of it ahead, wrapped round the clifftop like a beast of prey from his worst nightmares.

‘They would have given notice,’ his companion argued. ‘It would need an army of servants to get such a place in any sort of order after lying empty so long.’

‘True, but wouldn’t that army need to be directed by my man of business?’ Tom retaliated against a not very-well-disguised rebuke for neglecting the wretched place until it became the ruin he’d once sworn to make it.

‘I like a challenge, my lord,’ Peters said, and wasn’t he a mystery of a lawyer now Tom came to think about it?

Nothing about this business was simple, though, and he supposed he’d have to admit the man had been useful to Luke in the part of the quest Virginia set him. According to James Winterley, who had a way of knowing things you didn’t expect him to, Peters had helped a variety of aristocratic clients sort out the skeletons in their rosewood cupboards, including the Seaborne clan, whose shrewdness Tom would back against a corps of wily diplomats. So Tom had no choice but to trust this man to watch his back, even if the fellow saw too much of what lay below the surface of life for comfort.

‘You’re only here for three months, and heaven knows why Virginia thought I needed you by my side the entire time. Perhaps she expected you to force me up the drive at pistol-point if I lose my nerve.’

‘The late Lady Farenze merely instructed me to meet you in Dorchester and accompany you here. I couldn’t say what your godmother had in mind, my lord,’ Peters said primly, but there was a world of disapproval in his gaze.

Perhaps the man was a Jacobin? Tom decided he didn’t care if he was hell-bent on revolution, so long as they got on with this wretched business and left as soon as they found out what was wrong. ‘I believe I mentioned my dislike of being “my lorded” at every turn when we first met,’ he replied with a preoccupied frown at the neatly kept castle gatehouse.

‘I’m supposed to be your temporary secretary here, not your equal, my lord.’

Tom found himself doubting that and how unlike him to look deeper into another man’s life than he wanted him to. Lord Mantaigne had spent most of his adult life skimming over the surface of life like a pond-skater, and Tom shook his head at the picture of himself not caring about anything very much. He’d loved his godmother and Virgil, but they were both dead now, and at least he’d managed to keep the rest of the world at arm’s length, except a voice whispered he’d let in Luke and his daughter and James. Now Lady Chloe and her spirited niece seemed to have chipped their way into a corner of what he’d thought was his cold heart, and how could he have been so careless as to let himself care about so many people without noticing?

He glared at a certain window high up in the ancient keep and stark memories rose up to whisper he was right not to come back until he had to. Virginia’s last letter had told him one of her legion of friends had written to tell her something was amiss at Dayspring and he must go and find out what was so wrong with the place, but all he could see wrong with it right now was that it was still standing. Only for the woman who had taken in the feral little beast who had once existed in that keep and loved him anyway would he revisit the place despite all his resolutions not to.

‘Whoever you intend to be, you’ll have a poor time of it here,’ he warned Peters as he slowed his greys to a walk.

‘I expect I’ll survive; I’m not faint-hearted.’

‘Just as well. My last guardian only kept a few servants here once he took control of the estate for me, and I paid them off when I came of age,’ Tom warned.

Peters shrugged as if he wanted to get on with his mission and leave, before he violated some lawyerly code and told a client exactly what he thought of his criminal neglect of such an historic property.

‘I expect there will be a couple of rooms we can make habitable for the few days I intend to spend here,’ Tom added glumly.

‘Indeed, although the castle looks very well preserved to me, despite your orders it should not be.’

‘And it’s evidently a lot less empty than it ought to be,’ Tom mused with a frown as he watched a plume of smoke waft lazily from a chimney in the oldest part of the castle.

The place had an air of being down at heel, but it wasn’t the echoing ruin it ought to be after being left empty so long. There were deep ruts in the road leading down to Castle Cove that made him wonder even more who had stopped it falling into the sea. Virginia was right to make him come here to find out what was going on, and he pictured her impatiently telling him she’d told him so from her place in heaven. He had to suppress a grin at the idea of her regarding him with still very fine dark eyes and a puckish grin that told the world Lady Virginia Farenze was still ready to jump into any adventure going with both feet.

He missed her with an ache that made him feel numb at times and furious at others. Lord Mantaigne was a care-for-nobody, but he’d cared more for Virginia than he’d let himself know until he lost her. Still, one of his childhood resolutions was safe; he would never marry and risk leaving a son of his alone in a hostile world. The Winterley family might have trampled his boyhood vow never to care about anyone in the dust, but that one wasn’t in any danger. He hadn’t met a female he couldn’t live without in all his years as one of the finest catches on the marriage mart, so he was hardly likely to find her in a dusty backwater like Dayspring Castle.

‘Some traffic clearly passes this way,’ Peters remarked with a nod at the uneven road in case Tom was too stupid or careless to notice.

Ordering Dayspring’s ruin on what must seem a rich man’s whim was one thing, but being judged stupid set Tom’s teeth on edge. Was he vain about his intellect as well as finicky about personal cleanliness and a neat appearance? Probably, he decided ruefully. The last Marquis of Mantaigne already seemed to be learning more about himself than he really wanted to know, and his three months of servitude had barely begun.

‘Heavy traffic as well,’ he murmured, frowning at the spruce gatehouse and well-maintained gates and wondering if there was a link between those carts and whoever kept it so neatly.

‘Perhaps we should follow in their hoof prints towards the stables? At least that way is well used, and the castle gates look sternly locked against all comers.’

‘Since there are clearly more people here than there ought to be, I’ll start as I mean to go on.’ Tom replied.

‘Maybe, but I don’t have any skill with the yard of tin so I’m afraid I can’t announce you in style.’

‘I knew I should have brought my head groom with me and left you to follow on one of the carts, Peters. Hand it over and hold the ribbons while we see what this idle fool can do with it instead.’

‘I never said you were a fool, my lord.’

‘Only a wastrel?’ Tom drawled as insufferably as he could manage, because being here prickled like a dozen wasp stings and why should he suffer alone?

‘I don’t suppose my opinion of anyone I work with during this year Lady Farenze decreed in her will matters to you.’

‘I’m sure you underestimate yourself, Peters.’

‘Do I, my lord? I wonder,’ the man said with his usual grave reserve.

Tom wondered why Virginia had thought he needed someone to watch his back in what should be a straightforward ruin by now. Perhaps she was right, though, he decided with a shrug when he considered his non-ruin and the rutted lane down to the sea, but he still played down to Peters’s poor opinion of him by raising an arrogant eyebrow and imperiously holding out a gloved hand for the yard of tin.

The greys accepted the change of driver with a calmness that surprised their owner as he produced an ear-splitting blast and, when there was still no sign of life, gave the series of emphatic demands for attention he’d learnt from Virgil’s coachman as a boy. He was about to give in and drive in the wake of those carts when the door slammed open and an ageing bruiser stamped into view.

‘Noise fit to wake the dead,’ he complained bitterly. ‘Yon castle’s closed up. You won’t find a welcome up there even if I was to let you in,’ he said, squinting up at them against the afternoon sun.

‘I don’t expect one here, so kindly open up before I decide it was a mistake not to have the place razed to the ground.’

‘You’re the Marquis of Mantaigne?’

‘So I’m told.’

‘Himself is said to be a prancing town dandy who never sets foot outdoors in daylight and lives in the Prince of Wales’s pocket, when he ain’t too busy cavorting about London and Brighton with other men’s wives and drinking like a fish, of course. You sure you want to be him?’

‘Who else would admit it after such a glowing summary of my life, but, pray, who am I trying to convince I’m the fool you speak of so highly?’

‘Partridge, my lord, and lord I suppose you must be, since you’re right and nobody else would admit to being you in this part of the world.’

‘What a nest of revolutionary fervour this must be. Now, if you’ll open the gates I’d like to enter my own castle, if you please?’ Tom said in the smooth but deadly tone he’d learnt from Virgil, when some idiot was fool enough to cross him.

‘You’ll do better to go in the back way, if go in you must. It’s a tumbledown old place at the best of times, m’lord, and there’s nobody to open the front door. These here gates ain’t been opened in years.’

Tom eyed carefully oiled hinges and cobbles kept clear of grass both sides of the recently painted wrought-iron gates. ‘I might look like a flat, Partridge, but I do have the occasional rational thought in my head,’ he said with a nod at those well-kept gates the man claimed were so useless.

‘A man has his pride and I’m no idler.’

‘How laudable—now stop trying to bam me and open the gates.’

Partridge met Tom’s eyes with a challenge that changed to grudging respect when he looked back without flinching. At last the man shrugged and went inside for the huge key to turn in the sturdy lock and Tom wasn’t surprised to see the gates open as easily as if they’d been used this morning. He thanked Partridge with an ironic smile and, as the man clanged the gates behind the curricle, wondered who the old fox was doing his best to warn that an intruder was on his way even he couldn’t repel.

‘I’m still surprised such an old building isn’t falling down after so many years of neglect,’ Peters remarked as Tom drove his team up the ancient avenue and tried to look as if he hadn’t a care in the world.

‘Some misguided idiot must have disobeyed all my orders,’ Tom said bitterly.

Memories of being dragged up here bruised and bleeding and begging to be let go before his guardian got hold of him haunted him, but he was master here now and thrust the memory of that ragged and terrified urchin to the back of his mind where he belonged.

‘Anyway, if I intended to let the place fall down without having to give orders for it to be demolished, I seem to have been frustrated,’ he managed to remark a little more calmly.

‘And I wonder how you feel about that.’

‘So do I,’ Tom mused wryly.

He accepted there was no welcome to be had at the massive front door and drove to the stable yard, feeling he’d made his point, if only to Peters and the gatekeeper. He saw two sides of the square that formed the stable blocks and the imposing entrance and clock tower were closed up and empty, paint peeling and a cast-iron gutter, broken during some tempest, left to rust where it fell. The remaining block was neat and well kept, though, and two curious horses were peering out of their stables as if glad of company.

‘More frustration for you,’ Peters murmured.

‘Never mind that, who the devil is living here? I ordered it empty as a pauper’s pocket and they can’t be any kin of mine because I don’t have any.’

‘How did you plan to look after your team when we got here then, let alone the carts and men following behind?’

‘The boot is full of tack, oats and horse blankets, so it’s your own comfort I’d be worrying myself about if I were you.’

‘I will, once we have these lads safely stowed in the nice comfortable stable someone’s left ready for them,’ Peters said with a suspicious glance about the yard that told Tom they had the same idea about such empty but prepared stables and what they might be used for this close to the coast.

‘Keep that pistol handy while we see to the horses,’ he cautioned.

Chapter Two

It didn’t take long to remove the harness and lead the now-placid team into four waiting stalls and rub them down. Once they were cool enough, Tom and Peters hefted the ready-filled water buckets so the horses could drink after their leisurely journey, then they left them to pull happily at the hay-net someone had left ready. Tom was enjoying the sights and sounds of contented horses when the shaft of mellow afternoon sunlight from the half-open door was blocked by a new arrival. Pretending to be cool as the proverbial cucumber, he cursed himself for leaving his coat and pistol out of reach and turned to face the newcomer with a challenge that rapidly turned to incredulity.

‘Ye gods!’ he exclaimed, stunned by the appearance of a shining goddess with no shame at all, at Dayspring of all places.

‘Minerva or Hera?’ he heard Peters murmur in the same bewildered tone and felt a glimmer of impatience that the man was ogling the woman he urgently wanted himself. He could hardly wait to wrap those endless feminine legs about his own flanks and be transported to the heights of Olympus as soon as he could get those scandalous breeches off her.

‘You should at least get Greece and Rome sorted out in your head before you make such foolish comparisons in future,’ the vision said crossly, proving she had acute hearing, as well as a classical education and the finest feminine legs Tom had ever seen, in or out of his bedchamber, and he badly wanted this pair naked in one as soon as he could charm, persuade or just plain beg her to let him make love to her.

‘I’ll be happy in either so long as you’re with me, Athene,’ Tom recovered himself enough to offer with a courtly bow she should find flattering.

‘And I have no time for such nonsense and nor do you, Mr Whoever-You-Might-Be. You’re going to be far too busy reharnessing those fine horses of yours to that pretty little carriage and driving them back the way you came to indulge in such ridiculous fancies.’

‘Why would I do that?’

‘Because I demand you remove them from our stables immediately.’

‘Our stables?’ Tom’s mind latched on to the possessive word among so many he could argue with and he wondered why it seemed so important she had no intimate other to pair herself with instead of him.

‘Ours, mine, whatever you prefer. I’d certainly prefer you to go quickly and stop staring at my legs.’

‘If you don’t want them leered at, you should resume your petticoats. We males can’t resist eyeing such fine feminine charms when they’re so temptingly displayed without them.’

‘A true gentleman wouldn’t look,’ she informed him, looking haughtily down a nose Hera or Minerva would have been justly proud of.

‘Oh, but he would, wouldn’t he, Peters? Peters is a proper gentleman, Athene, although I am only a nobleman myself,’ Tom said, not at all sure he liked being looked at as if he was a caterpillar on a cabbage leaf.

‘So you say,’ she said sceptically.

Tom had often wished the world could see beyond the wealth and prestige he’d been born to and now he wanted an unlikely goddess to be impressed by them? Folly, he told himself, and goddesses didn’t wear an odd mix of outdated clothes that looked as if they’d belonged to a few of his ancestors before they found a new glory on her.

‘So I know,’ he managed coolly enough.

‘Prove it then.’

He laughed at the notion he needed to and at Dayspring of all places. Should he thank her for distracting him from the ordeal he’d thought this homecoming would be without her? ‘Do you expect me to produce a letter of introduction from the patronesses of Almack’s, or an invitation to Carlton House? Perhaps the record of my birth in the local parish church might do the trick—what would you advise, Peters?’

‘Any one might be a fraud,’ she argued before Peters could open his mouth.

‘And I’m not prepared to prove myself on my own property, madam,’ Tom said, deciding it was time to bring the game to an end.

‘Everyone in the neighbourhood knows the Marquis of Mantaigne never sets foot beyond the clubs of St James’s or the ballrooms of Mayfair during this season of the year and has sworn not to come here as long as he lives. You need to think your story out better if you plan to masquerade as that idle fool.’

‘You think me more useful and less vain than Lord Mantaigne? Hasn’t anyone told you appearances are deceptive?’

‘Not as badly as yours would have to be,’ she said as if it was a coup de grâce.

Stray curls of russet-brown hair had worked free from the impressive plait hanging down her back to dance about her brow and distract Tom from a subject that kept slipping away from him as he wondered why she was so irresistibly female when her dress and manner were anything but.

‘Blue,’ he mused out loud as he met the smoky mystery of her eyes under long dark lashes. Her unusually marked eyebrows made her frown seem exaggerated and her smile a delicious flight of mischief, or at least he thought it might be, if she ever smiled at him, which currently seemed unlikely. Just as well really, he supposed hazily; if she ever gave up frowning he might walk straight into the promises and secrets in her unique eyes and fall under her witchy spell for ever.

‘No, they might be grey,’ he muttered as he tried to disentangle smoke and mystery from reality. ‘Or perhaps even a little bit green.’

He saw shock in the bluey-grey marvel of her eyes, with those intriguing rays of green in their fascinating depths when she widened them, as if suddenly realising they were staring at each other. She shot Peters a questioning look, as if Tom might be a lunatic and the lawyer his unlucky keeper.

‘I am the sixth Marquis of Mantaigne and have been so for most of my life,’ Tom informed her testily, ‘but who the devil are you?’

‘None of your business,’ she snapped back.

‘How ironic that I’ve come back after all these years and nobody seems to believe I have the right to, don’t you think, Peters?’ Tom mused to play for time whilst he gathered his senses.

‘Much about life is ironic, my lord,’ Peters said unhelpfully.

‘Aye,’ Tom drawled with an emphatic look at his reluctant hostess that should make her blush and run to fetch whoever tried to lend her countenance.

Not that she had any idea of her own looks, he decided with a frown. She must be close to six feet tall to meet his eyes so easily, especially when looking down her haughty Roman nose as if he was the source of an unpleasant smell she hadn’t been able to track down until now. Most of her inches were made up of leg and he almost wished he carried a quizzing glass so he could infuriate her all the more. Not that she didn’t have a superb body to match those long and slender feminine legs of hers; dressed in form-fitting breeches, flowing shirt and a tight spencer jacket as she was, he’d be a fool not to notice she had a fine collection of feminine curves to go with them.

The wonder was she could roam round Dayspring in such a guise without a pack of wolves hunting her as such beasts usually did any unprotected female. She must be able to go about unmolested, though, since she hadn’t stopped doing it, and that made him take her more seriously than he wanted to. If ever he’d met a feminine disaster waiting to happen it was this argumentative young goddess and he hadn’t time or energy to cope with the challenge she presented just now.

‘You don’t look like any of the portraits of past Lord Mantaignes scattered about the castle,’ she informed him with the sort of infuriated glare he hadn’t been subjected to since he last annoyed Virginia.

‘I doubt if one of my father survived my former guardian’s rule here, but I’m told I take after him,’ Tom said, wondering why it mattered.

‘Don’t you know?’

‘I don’t remember either of my parents.’

‘That’s as may be, but none of the pictures look like you,’ she said accusingly.

He sighed in his best impression of a bored society beau and hoped she found it as superior and annoying as he meant her to. She took a long look at his dusty but perfectly fitted boots, then her gaze flicked dismissively over the coat Weston would no longer be quite so proud to admit was his handiwork lying nearby, but he saw the odd giveaway sign she wasn’t as confident of his nonentity as she wanted him to believe. Her breathing came a little short and there was a hint of desperation in those fine eyes, as if the truth was too much to cope with and she wanted to fend it off as long as possible.

‘I dare say you know the State Rooms better than I do. My guardian never let me explore that part of the house when I lived here,’ he admitted, trying to shrug off the feeling he’d revealed too much.

‘The villagers do say Lord Mantaigne’s guardian was a cruel man,’ she conceded, thinking about rearranging her prejudices, but not yet ready to turn them on their head.

‘How tactful of them,’ he said with a bitter smile.

Why the devil had he let Virginia bullock him into coming here? Tom wanted to be out of this intimate stable in the fresh air. With hints of fish and brine, seaweed and wide oceans on the breeze from the sea, at least that was something his guardian had never been able to take from him. How could he have forgotten that and all the other things he loved about this place, despite the neglect and cruelty he’d endured? He’d never wanted to set eyes on this place, but the scent of the sea settled a strange sort of longing in him for home that he hadn’t even known he had until he got here.

He used to risk his life creeping down the hoary old stones of the North Tower as soon as his bare feet were big enough to cling to the bumps and cracks in the rock. Grably was too much of a coward to kill the ‘spawn of the devil’, he had called Tom when no outsiders were listening, but he wouldn’t have shed a tear if Tom had fallen to his death and saved him the stain of murder on his mean and twisted soul.

‘I suppose you could be him,’ a very different keeper of Dayspring Castle admitted begrudgingly and wrenched his thoughts back to the present. ‘You’re the right age, but Maggie said his little lordship looked an angel fallen out of Heaven and you don’t look angelic to me.’

‘You know my one-time nurse then?’ he said, sounding far too eager. That reminder of the one constant in his life after his father had died, until his guardian sent her away, caught him unawares.

‘I knew Lord Mantaigne’s childhood nurse before she died,’ she said, eyeing him as if unsure his word could be trusted or not.

Not, Tom concluded, at least not if she was aware of her own allure as she stood in the shadowed gloom of the stables and stared at him as if she could read his sooty soul. Not, if she was possibly the most unlikely virgin lady he had ever met, with her mannish garments, unmanly figure and a mass of unruly hair barely held by the tail she’d plaited it into some time during the last week.

An unforgivably urgent desire to see the heavy weight of it about her naked shoulders like rumpled silk taunted his body and his senses. Half hiding and half enhancing a figure he knew would be as perfect in real human flesh as any classical statue of a two-thousand-year-old goddess carved in ancient Greece, he could picture it rippling over the fine skin he suspected was creamy and satin smooth where the sun hadn’t reached her not-quite-redhead’s skin and tinted it pale gold.

Considering nothing about her seemed quite sure how to be, she was a very definite snare for a man who liked his ladies bold and confident of their own charms. Her hair wasn’t quite red, brown or blonde and he’d already had that silly discussion with himself about her eyes. He could feel Peters’s cool gaze on him as he realised what the unwary goddess wouldn’t let herself see—that she was in the presence of a lone wolf and could be very unsafe indeed. If not for where they were and what he’d been sent here to do, she would be in more danger than Peters realised, but Tom couldn’t afford distractions until he got to the bottom of a very odd barrel of fish.

‘Knew her?’ he asked after he’d racked his brains to recall what they were talking about before he got distracted again.

‘She died five years ago,’ his mystery snapped.

‘I have no resident agent here,’ he said stiffly. ‘Nor have I kept in contact with anyone in the villages.’

‘Something they know all too well,’ she condemned, and he suddenly felt impatient of his would-be judge and jury.

‘Something they can now complain about directly to me, if I ever manage to leave these stables and meet any of them,’ he said wearily.

‘Is he really the Marquis of Mantaigne?’ she asked Peters, as if unable to trust his word, and Tom bit back an impatient curse.

‘Ask yourself if he could be anyone else, ma’am, and I suspect you’ll have your answer. I’m his employee, so you can’t trust me to tell the truth. Lord Mantaigne could terminate my employment if I was to argue against him.’

‘As if I would dare,’ Tom allowed himself to drawl and felt he’d almost won back the detachment he prided himself on.

‘He looks useless enough to be a marquis, or he might if he was wearing that dandified coat,’ she allowed with a nod of contempt at a once-exquisite example of Weston’s fine work.

‘Do you think there might be a compliment hiding somewhere in that sentence if I look hard enough for it, Peters?’ Tom asked as if they needed a translator.

‘I wouldn’t bet your rent rolls on it, my lord.’

‘Paulina! Oh, Polly! Wherever are you hiding yourself this time?’ a brisk soprano voice called before being drowned out by what sounded like a pack of large and hungry dogs barking as if they were eager to sink their teeth into any passing stranger—be he a marquis or a commoner.

Tom’s guardian used to hunt him down with his pack when he thought he’d had his freedom for too long. Remembered fear made him cast a swift glance in the direction of the hunt kennels his guardian had built far enough away for their howls not to keep him awake at nights. Luckily his companions were too busy to see it and he clamped adult self-control on childhood fears and reminded himself he’d learnt to like and trust dogs since then.

‘I know you’re in the stables because these misbegotten hounds insist you are, so who does the curricle belong to?’ that brisk voice added from much nearer at hand.

‘Which question would you prefer me to answer first, Lady W.?’ the goddess shouted over the hubbub.

Paulina-whoever-she-was sounded as calmly unruffled as any woman could with such a commotion going on in her stable yard, but shouldn’t that be his stable yard? And why did he feel a need to claim the property he’d been tempted to destroy all his adult life?’

‘How many times have I told you not to call me by that repellent nickname?’ the newcomer demanded.

‘So many I wonder you still bother,’ Paulina replied as Tom peered over her shoulders and managed to meet the lady’s shrewd blue eyes. ‘He claims he’s the Marquis of Mantaigne and this is Lady Wakebourne,’ Paulina said as if not quite sure how to introduce a possible impostor.

‘Lady Wakebourne,’ he said, searching his memory for clues to how the lady fitted into the complex patchwork of the ton.

He dredged up the tale of a certain Sir Greville Wakebourne, who had bankrupted a great many people before putting a bullet in his brain several years ago. This lady, who had evidently been a true beauty in her youth, was probably his widow, but it was impossible to tell if she mourned the swindler or not. She didn’t look as if she dwelt on him or anything else in the past, so vivid and vital was her presence in the here and now.

‘Lord Mantaigne,’ she greeted him with such superb assurance he was in mid-bow before his brain reminded him he was the host here and not the other way about, but he carried on anyway.

‘Weren’t you one of my godmother’s coven of regular correspondents, my lady?’ he asked and felt Polly-Paulina’s gaze fix accusingly on him, as if he’d been trying to deceive her about his identity instead of trying to convince her he really was rightfully lord and master here.

‘Please accept my condolences on her death and desist from using such terms in future,’ Lady Wakebourne told him with a firmness that told him she was every bit as stubborn as the goddess.

‘Is he really the Marquis of Mantaigne?’ Polly-Paulina asked, sounding so disgruntled she must be taking him seriously.

‘Of course he is—why would anyone else admit to being a notorious rake and dandy?’ Lady Wakebourne replied before he could say a word, stern disapproval of his chosen way of life plain on her striking countenance.

‘They would if it meant getting his possessions along with his reputation,’ Paulina-whoever-she-was muttered.

Outraged barking had waned to a few vague snuffles and the odd whine as the owners of those formidable canine voices sniffed about the curricle for concealed villains. Now two huge paws hit the bottom half of the door and a shaggy head joined Lady Wakebourne’s attempts at blocking out daylight. The creature appeared comical until its panting revealed a set of strong white teeth the hounds of hell could be justly proud of.

‘Get down, sir,’ Lady Wakebourne ordered the enormous animal irritably. ‘If you must take in any stray lucky enough to cross your path, Polly, I wish you would train them not to dog my footsteps as if I actually like them.’

‘But you do,’ Polly said, seeing through Lady Wakebourne’s frown as easily as the large hound seemed to, given he was now watching her with dogged adoration.

An impatient bark from lower down said the hell-hound was blocking the view, so he sank back to sit next to a busy-looking terrier with a thousand battle scars and a cynical look in the one eye he had left. He met Tom’s gaze in a man-to-man sizing up that was almost human, and if a dog could snigger this one did in a crooked aside. An elderly greyhound with an aloof look that said I don’t get involved, so don’t blame me and a lolloping puppy with some spaniel and a great deal of amiable idiot completed the canine quartet. Even Tom couldn’t bring himself to blame them for the sins of the pack of half-starved beasts his guardian had once used to terrorise the neighbourhood and his small charge.

‘Not in the house, I don’t,’ Lady Wakebourne asserted, as if it was her house to be pernickety over if she chose.

Tom frowned as he searched his mind for a reason why the widow of a disgraced baronet was living in his house without his knowledge. ‘I expect several carts and their teams before dark, my lady. Can anyone help us make more of the stabling usable?’ he asked the simplest of the questions that came into his mind.

It felt strange to be so ignorant of his household, especially when there wasn’t supposed to be one. Two coachmen, several stalwart grooms and three footmen were on their way with supplies to make camping in a ruin bearable and they would need somewhere to bed down as well. It would be too dark to do much more than sleep by the time they arrived, but he’d often sought the warmth of the horses at night as a boy and one more night in the stables wouldn’t hurt him.

‘No, but the northern range is better than the west. It takes less battering from the winds that come in from the sea,’ Polly-Paulina said with a sly glance at Tom’s riding breeches, shining top-boots, snowy white shirt and grey-silk waistcoat. He wasn’t dressed for heavy labour, but she seemed happy about the idea of him doing some anyway.

He had no old clothes here and wouldn’t don them now if he had, so he hoped there was a copper of hot water over the fire betrayed by its smoking chimney. Tom met the girl’s hostile gaze, determined not to prove as useless as she clearly thought him.

‘We’ll need pitchforks and a wheelbarrow, buckets and a couple of decent brooms. You will have to remind me where the well is,’ he prompted as she stayed stubbornly silent.

‘The boys can come in from the gardens this late in the day to help, Paulina. They are probably disgracefully dirty by now anyway,’ Lady Wakebourne said with a caution in her voice to remind her fellow interloper some tact was needed when dealing with the owner of a house you were living in without his knowledge or permission.

For a long moment Paulina the Amazon glared at Tom, as if quite ready to lay aside any pretence of civility and risk expulsion. He raised one eyebrow to question her right to be furious with him, but she seemed unimpressed.

‘Very well,’ she finally agreed without taking her eyes off him, as if he might steal the silver if she did so.

He couldn’t help the mocking smile that kicked up his mouth, because it was his silver, or it would be if it hadn’t been taken away years ago.

‘Lunar, go and fetch Toby,’ she told the huge beast, as if he would understand. ‘Go on, boy, go fetch him in,’ she added when the bigger-than-a-wolf dog put his head on one side and eyed Tom and Peters as if not sure it was safe to leave them here.

‘Maybe he’d feel better if we went with him?’ Tom suggested lightly.

‘The boys would run away from such a dandy,’ Paulina-Polly muttered darkly, shooting him a look that said she wouldn’t blame them.

‘Perhaps it would be better if you went yourself then,’ he said blandly.

The hound sat on his mighty haunches and eyed first him, then his younger mistress, as if awaiting his cue to protect her to the last breath in his amiable body.

‘Or you could make it a clear to your mixed pack of hell-hounds we’re not going to rip each other to pieces when their backs are turned?’ he added.

‘I would have to be certain myself,’ he thought he heard her mutter under her breath, but then she seemed to make a huge effort to be civil and held out her hand as a sign to their canine audience that peace reigned.

Tom took it, wondering at the state a lady could get her hand in and not care. A glance at her short nails and tanned skin, nicked and scarred here and there from her labours, did nothing to warn him how it would feel in his broad, well-manicured palm. Ah, here she is, at last, an inner voice he ordered not to be so foolish whispered. He felt emotions he didn’t want to examine stir and threaten something impossible at the feel of work-hardened calluses on her slender fingers and finely made palm.

She shouldn’t have to work at anything more strenuous than pleasing herself and me, his inner idiot whispered in his ear. A shock of something hot and significant he’d never felt before shot through him like a fiery itch. It was too much of an effort to shake her slender hand then let it go as if she was just a new acquaintance.

‘I’m honoured to meet you, Miss Paulina,’ he said as lightly as if they had met in a Mayfair ballroom or, heaven forbid, Almack’s Club. He’d long ago resolved never to venture there again for fear of the tenacious matchmaking mamas and their formidably willing daughters.

‘Trethayne,’ Lady Wakebourne said abruptly. ‘Her name is Miss Trethayne and since she has no elder sister that is all you are required to know.’

Tom felt the girl’s hand tug insistently in his, realised he was still holding it like a mooncalf and relaxed his grip with unflattering haste. No wonder she was glaring at him now, and the vast hound was growling under his breath, rather than running off to fetch Toby from the garden as he was bid, whoever Toby might be.

‘Three tired teams and their drivers will be arriving here in the next couple of hours, so I suggest we put aside questions of what a Trethayne and you, Lady Wakebourne, are doing here under my less-than-comfortable roof and get on with preparing the stables to lodge them as best we can.’

‘Something you should have thought about when you set out,’ Miss Trethayne informed him, and Tom bit back an urge to defend his right to visit his own house if he wanted to, or even if he didn’t.

‘And if you expect me to put off examining your presence here, perhaps you should lay aside your hostility,’ he suggested coldly.

Part of him wanted to trade words with her until the sun went down, for the sheer pleasure of gazing at her scandalously displayed form and extraordinary face, but the rest knew better. She had fascinating eyes and then there was that strong nose that should make her a character, not a beauty, but didn’t. Her mouth was too wide to fit an accredited beauty as well, but it was as full of unstudied allure as the rest of her. There, hadn’t he just ordered himself not to catalogue her graces? Fully recognising his desire to kiss her deeply and urgently would be folly; best not think of such fiery needs when dressed in tight buckskin breeches—for all they concealed of his errant masculine urges he might as well stand here buck naked.

‘You’d best get on with cleansing the Augean Stables before it’s pitch dark and you can’t see what you’re doing, then,’ she said with a shrug, opening the stable doors with a glance of contempt at his once-spotless linen and expensive tailoring.

He was glad to see it contained none of the cynicism in Lady Wakebourne’s gaze as she silently challenged him to keep any lustful thoughts he might harbour about Miss Polly Trethayne strictly to himself. Bracing himself to meet the assorted hounds at closer quarters with suitably manly composure, Tom stepped out in Miss Trethayne’s wake and blinked in the late-afternoon sunshine. The four dogs sat to attention at a stern word from Lady Wakebourne, looking more comical than threatening as they watched her as if they knew they’d violated the laws of hospitality by being uncivil to guests.

‘Lunar, Zounds, Ariel and Cherubim, otherwise known as Cherry,’ the lady introduced them. ‘Lunar, give a paw,’ she commanded the great hound, who was clearly reserving the option to bite Tom if he misbehaved.

The terrier, Zounds, let out a gruff bark; Ariel looked regally indifferent, and Cherry rolled onto her back and waved all four feet in the air in a frantic plea for attention.

‘Hussy,’ Lady Wakebourne said with a sad shake of her head that didn’t deceive anyone, and the half-grown spaniel-cross waved her paws to tell her mistress she still wanted her belly scratched, hussy or no.

Chapter Three

Polly watched the castle’s official reception committee behave in character and sighed. It was too much to hope the man would be scared of Lunar’s mighty build and need to protect them to his last breath. She had sensed fear in the tall figure at her side and tried to convince herself it made him less of a man, but then he’d sauntered out of the stables in her wake as if he hadn’t a care in the world and confounded her again. How could she not admire a man who confronted his fears with such style, even if she didn’t want to like anything about him?

Cherry decided a pantomime of what she wanted wasn’t doing the trick and yipped a command in his lordship’s direction, so he bent to give the pup a full belly rub she enjoyed so much she let out a little moan of delight and threatened to surge to her feet and jump at him in an excess of joy.

‘No!’ Lady Wakebourne ordered firmly, so Cherry simply demanded more fuss, and Polly felt the rich echoes of his laugh prickle like a warning along her spine.

‘Misbegotten hound,’ Lady Wakebourne said, and Cherry wagged her tail as if it was a huge compliment.

‘Go get the boys,’ Polly ordered Lunar and Zounds, and they bounded off, or at least Lunar bounded. Zounds skittered after him as fast as his uneven gait would allow, and Ariel weighed his options and decided he would like a run, so he streaked after them like the wind. Cherry saw she was being left behind, gave Lord Mantaigne an apologetic lick and dashed off as well.

‘The pump?’ his lordship asked Polly with one of those exceptionally irritating eyebrows of his quirked in an imperious question.

‘There is no pump, only a bucket on a rope,’ she said to him with a nod at the most deeply shadowed corner of the yard.

This was no time to soften towards him and join in the mighty clean it would take before the empty stable block was at all usable. Polly fetched the giant key to the tack room on the other side of the quadrangle, daring him to complain at the decay he’d caused in the first place. They’d fought his wilful neglect since the first day they happened on the castle, so he could see for himself how hard that struggle was for an hour of his soft life.

He didn’t look soft as he turned the key in the ancient lock without apparent effort. It was beyond her strength to move it without both hands and much cursing and swearing, and Polly told herself it was wrong to ogle his magnificently displayed physique as blatantly as he had done hers and sighed under her breath. His coming here would change everything, and all the wishing him away in the world wouldn’t alter the fact he was home at last. An untamed part of her was intrigued and even a little bit triumphant about the fact he’d been well worth waiting for.

Well, he didn’t know about the Polly she kept well hidden, and she certainly wasn’t going to tell him. Nor was he going to lord it over them; not after neglecting this wonderful old place so shamefully a battalion of thieves could have hidden here without any risk of being challenged. She recalled her father telling her nobody could make her feel small and insignificant unless she let them and bit back a smile as she wondered what her adventurous parent would make of his tall and all-too-significant daughter now.

Not a great deal, a sneaky voice whispered in her ear, but she hid her self-doubts behind the mask of confidence Papa had taught her to use to outface her enemies. Except she couldn’t afford to be headlong and reckless and arrogant as he’d been the first to admit a true Trethayne was by nature and intent. He had lost every penny they ever had, and a good few they didn’t; then he died during an insane midnight race across the moors to try to recoup his losses with a mad bet on his favourite horse.

Claire, her stepmother, had died when her smallest brother was born, so seven years on from Stephen Trethayne’s reckless and untimely death Polly and her little brothers lived on whatever they could grow or make at Dayspring Castle, which went to show what happened when Trethaynes refused to rein in their wilder impulses. At times she had longed for a life of passion and adventure instead of hard work and loneliness, but Polly only had to recall how it felt to be seventeen with three little boys to raise on nothing and the urgency faded.

Yet a dart of something deep and dangerous had shot through her at first sight of this handsome golden-haired Adonis, staring back at her as if she was water in a desert. It still sang somewhere deep down inside her as if he’d branded her with warm lightning. She shivered at what might be, if she wasn’t four and twenty and father, mother and every other relative they had never had to three little brothers, and if Lord Mantaigne wasn’t one of the richest and most powerful aristocrats in the land.

She shook her head at the ridiculous idea of him wanting her as other than a passing fancy she was not willing to be. Trying to distract herself, she wondered how many horses and servants were on their way with the luxuries he would demand as his right. She could imagine him a great lord or prince in medieval times on a grand progress about the land with a huge entourage of brightly arrayed courtiers and an army of servants to answer his every need along the way. If Dayspring Castle was once capable of housing such a household, it certainly wasn’t now. She scaled down his retinue to a couple of carriages and a few carts laden with boxes of superbly cut clothes to deck him out in style.

He would need a valet to keep such splendour bandbox fresh and wasn’t it lucky the thought of him mincing down Bond Street carrying such an item after a visit to the milliner made her want to laugh? Whatever she thought of him, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to know what that was; even she couldn’t accuse him of being effete.

She would like to, of course, but she couldn’t delude herself so badly. Not with his powerful breadth of shoulder and heavily muscled arms on show when he stood there in his shirtsleeves ready to begin his Herculean task. He had narrow flanks and long and sleekly muscled legs, finishing in those damned boots of his that made him look more like a tidied-up pirate than the mincing marquis her imagination had painted him.

His hair might have started out the day in neatly ranked waves or even the artful disorder some of the dandies affected, but now his golden locks were in such disarray he must be as impatient of a hat on such a fine spring day as she was herself. Which didn’t mean they had anything in common. The fine cut of his immaculate waistcoat; the stark whiteness of his linen shirt and beautifully tied neckcloth all argued the Marquis of Mantaigne was used to the finest money could buy. Miss Paulina Trethayne had long ago resigned herself to life shorn of all her kind took for granted and sniffed, as if doubtful he could lift a pitchfork, let alone wield one.

‘You’ll get very dirty,’ she warned, as if he couldn’t see the dust and smell the unused staleness of the air inside long-neglected stables for himself.

‘I’ll wash,’ he said indifferently, letting her implied insult pass as he surveyed the dust of ages in front of him. ‘We’ll need those buckets and something to scrub with as well as more hay and straw, if it can all be got at short notice.’

‘Enough of both are in the barn and there’s more in the rickyard,’ she said, and he raised his annoying eyebrows again, as if surprised they were so organised. He might not be so pleased when he realised animals and crops came ahead of people in their household and there would not be enough to feed him in style.

‘Good, we’d best get on with it then, if you’ll tell us where a couple of decent brooms and buckets are, then leave us to our labours, Miss Trethayne?’ he said, as if he swept and washed down stables every day dressed in Bond Street’s finest and with that fallen-angel smile never wavering for a second.

Mr Peters eyed the blanket of stale dust and detritus overlaying everything and looked as if he had better places to be. Moved by his mournful look at his neatly made coat as he took it off, as if he was bidding goodbye to his sober raiment and tidy appearance for ever, Polly went to make sure fires were lit under the vast coppers in the laundry to provide baths for the lord as well as his man. If there was only water for one, doubtless the marquis would take it all and let his fastidious aide sleep in his dirt, so there was no point trying to make him even more eager to leave by skimping on such necessities after their hard labour.

* * *

Tom and Peters were almost unrecognisable as the lord of this ancient pile and his supposed secretary by the time all four cartloads of luggage and provisions rolled down the rutted drive. It was dusk and on the edge of true darkness by then and the grooms and stable lads seemed delighted to be at journey’s end, even if it didn’t promise more than a roof over their heads against the coming night. Their calls to each other and exclamations at the state of the roads and their new lodgings made the yard livelier than it must have been for decades. Tom shook his head as if he was Lunar trying to dislodge a persistent fly and dust and old cobwebs threatened their handiwork with a new sprinkling of ancient history.

‘Hercules had the River Styx handy to divert through the Augean Stables,’ Peters remarked gloomily as he swept up the dislodged dust and followed his broom outside into the fading daylight, before Tom could make more work.

‘And the nice warm Aegean to bathe in when he was done,’ Tom said with a grin at his once-pristine companion. ‘You look as if you’ve been pulled through a hedge backwards, rolled in the dust and trampled by a herd of wild horses.’

‘I feel filthy,’ Peters said disgustedly, and Tom laughed.

‘Ah, but you must admit the place is full of surprises,’ he said.

‘Aye, it’s confounded us so far,’ the man said as if that wasn’t a good thing, but hard work had settled some of the tension of the past few days, and Tom didn’t intend to fall into a gloom again.

‘At least there’s not much chance of being bored for the next few weeks.’

‘Boredom can be a good thing, given the alternative,’ Peters said with a sigh, but Tom turned to greet his head groom and managed to ignore him.

‘There’s good news and bad, Dacre,’ he informed the man cheerfully once Dacre reported a smooth journey and they had compared notes on the roads and the state of the horses after the easy run they’d had today.

‘I can see the bad part of it, milord, so what’s to be happy about?’

‘Mr Peters and I have swept and scrubbed the unused stables as best we can, so we can house the horses in reasonable comfort and safety. If your lads go and fetch bedding and feed from the barns over yonder, I dare say the nags will be as happy as we can make them, even if I don’t hold much hope for the rest of us. I trust you didn’t push the teams so hard we can’t water them when you find a few more buckets?’

‘Not I, but it’s as well we brought plenty with us, my lord,’ Dacre said with a disapproving look at their handiwork.

Tom’s head groom always disdained anything he hadn’t ordered himself on principle, but, since Amazonian Miss Trethayne had sent her three young brothers and other assorted urchins to ‘help’, Tom knew they had achieved a lot. Luckily the lads had soon grown bored with sweeping up choking clouds of ancient dust and cleaning windows and melted away to find more amusing things to do.

‘Never mind, Dacre. Barnabas will be here with the riding horses any moment, he can help you restore order in the morning,’ Tom said.

‘I’ll try to be grateful for small mercies then, my lord.’

‘For now the horses need your attention and I hope you find all their gear on the wagons in the dark. A few moth-eaten brushes and a curry-comb with every other tooth missing won’t do the job after their journey.’

‘Very true, my lord. Now you leave the beasts to me while you go and turn yourself back into a gentleman.’

‘Of course. Why else would I pay you so handsomely? Even when you think it’s your duty to set me down like a scrubby schoolboy with every other word.’

‘Somebody has to do it, my lord,’ Dacre replied dourly. ‘Her ladyship trusted me with the job when you was a lad, and I’m not done hoping you’ll toe the line one day quite yet.’

‘Do let me know when you consider me mature enough to run my own life, won’t you?’ Tom said cheerfully.

Knowing he could relax and leave his horses and men in good hands now, he wondered if he and Peters would have to make do with a very quick dip in the still not-very-warm April sea he could hear whispering against the foreshore of the cove below the castle. There was no chance of him getting a wink of sleep if he tried to bed down in all this dirt, even if it was in a stable, so the sea it would have to be and what else had he expected of the wreck he’d made of his former home?

‘Polly said we were to bring lanterns to light you and Mr Peters inside,’ little Joshua Trethayne’s childish voice piped up as the glow of them softened the fast falling darkness in the stable yard. ‘But you’re to be careful because the whole place will go up like a tinder box if you let one fall, or so Lady W. says. Oh, and you’re not to be late for supper if you have to scrape the dirt off to be in time.’

‘Bagpipe,’ Master Henry Trethayne condemned his little brother in his halfway between child-and-man voice. ‘Lady Wakebourne said we’re to say there’s enough hot water for two baths in the coppers, but you’ll have to take them in the laundry house, because there’s nobody to carry water up and down stairs for you.’

‘And there’s the biggest pie we ever saw ready for dinner and we’re starved,’ the boy Tom thought was called Joe said from behind the three brothers.

‘We’d best hurry, Peters,’ Tom told his filthy companion, wondering if he had that much dust and dirt on his once-immaculate person as well. ‘Do you know if there’s any soap to spare, boys? Or must I search the wagons before we come in?’

‘I sincerely hope not, my lord,’ Peters said as if he’d experienced quite enough misplaced optimism for one day, ‘you would get dust and dirt on everything.’

‘Aye, there’s soap all right,’ one of the skinny urchins Tom thought more at home on a London street than rural Dorset said gloomily, ‘more of it than a body should have to put up with in a whole lifetime, if you asks me.’

‘That’s because you’re a mudlark,’ Henry Trethayne said cheerfully.

‘Then at least I ain’t a pretty little gentleman.’

‘D’you still think I’m pretty now?’ Henry asked as he lunged for his friend and wrestled him to the ground.

‘Please ignore them, my lord,’ his elder brother said loftily, but Tom’s night vision was good enough to see him eyeing the pair with the wistfulness of an adult looking back on the pleasures of his youth. ‘They know no better, I’m afraid.’

‘Clearly,’ he said as solemnly as he could. ‘Now, about that soap and water? Could you point us in the direction of it so we’re rid of our dirt before the ladies see us? We’ll get a fine scolding if we venture inside looking like this.’

‘Hmm? Oh, yes, Josh will take you, won’t you, Josh?’ the boy said absently, weighing up how best to intervene as a third boy launched himself into the fray and maturity felt less important than evening the odds.

‘Come on then, Mr Lord,’ the youngest Trethayne ordered cheerfully.

‘You don’t want to join in?’ Tom couldn’t help asking as they walked towards the castle with the noises of battle fading behind them.

‘I’m the smallest and weakest. It would be foolish and painful to do so,’ the boy informed him as if he was the grown up.

‘True,’ Peters said with a heartfelt sigh.

‘Younger son?’ Tom couldn’t help asking.

‘Something like that,’ his companion replied in his usual guarded tone when Tom tried to learn more about this enigma of a man than the enigma really wanted him to know.

Tom forgot his companions and everything else when Dayspring Castle loomed ever closer out of the half-dark. Its air of down-at-heel raffishness was hidden by the coming night and the feeling of malevolent power he recalled all too well from his childhood was in command once more. Then it had seemed to have a real, beating heart tucked away somewhere, hellbent on showing him he was as nothing compared to the grand history of Dayspring and its warrior lords.

His breath shortened and his heartbeat began to race, as if he was on the edge of the same panic he’d felt every time he was dragged back here from an attempt to run away as a boy. Back then he’d usually betrayed his terror by being physically sick or, on one terrible occasion, losing control of all his bodily functions as his guardian and that terrifying pack of dogs bayed at him from the castle steps and he felt the snap of savage jaws held just far enough off not to actually bite, but close enough to be a boy’s worst nightmare come horribly true. Thank Heaven Peters knew nothing of that awful moment of weakness as he remarked what a fine place it was and how he might envy its owner, if it wasn’t close to ruin.

‘It’s not a ruin,’ Joshua Trethayne said as if he loved it. ‘The North Tower is dangerous and Poll says we’re not to go there, even if someone could die if we don’t. Jago says it’s haunted, so I don’t want to go up there anyway and Toby can say I’m a coward as often as he likes, but I really don’t want to know who the ghost is.’

‘Quite right,’ Tom said dourly. ‘He’s not worth meeting.’

‘I would consider meeting any ghost a memorable experience, even if their very existence is beyond the realms of logic to me,’ Peters argued.

Tom was tempted to growl something disagreeable and stump off towards the laundry house he remembered as a warm, if damp, hiding place when he escaped his prison in the North Tower to roam about the countryside. Frightened of the smugglers and other unpredictable creatures of the night, he would come back here to sleep in the outbuildings and feed on scraps of food carelessly left out by the laundresses and grooms. With adult perception Tom realised that was done deliberately and felt a lot better about being back here all of a sudden. At least some of the people who once lived and worked here had cared enough about the ragged little marquis to leave him the means to stay free and safe for a little longer.

‘I was kept in that tower for several years by my wicked guardian, Master Trethayne. So, no, there are no ghosts up there I can assure you. I’d have been glad of their company, feral boy as I was back then.’

‘That’s what Poll said Jago was when Lady W. found him: a feral boy,’ Josh Trethayne said, and Tom could have kicked himself for saying too much about his past in front of this acute young gentleman, although there had to be rumours still flying about the area of shocking goings on up at the castle before Tom was taken away to be brought up by a very different guardian to the one he’d begun his career as an orphan with.

‘I dare say he and I would have got on well if we had met when I was young, then,’ Tom made himself say cheerfully as he tried to dismiss the past. ‘Right now I’m sharp set and filthy. Do you think your sister and Lady Wakebourne will mind if I eat in my dirt?’ he asked to divert the lad from what he’d revealed about his early life, lest he have nightmares of that long-lost boy shut up in the tower alone.

‘Yes, her ladyship says she has her standards, however low she’s fallen in life, and cleanliness costs only a bar of soap and some hot water, which is just as well since she can’t afford much more. We told her we’d be happy to save on the soap part to help out, but Poll insists it’s a price worth paying.’

‘Bad luck,’ Tom said sympathetically, recalling earnest arguments with Virginia on the same subject he’d been secretly relieved not to win when he looked back with a shudder on being filthy and on the brink of starvation at Dayspring Castle, before his life took an unexpected turn for the better with her arrival in it.

* * *

Polly stood up from stoking the fire in the communal room they’d made from the great parlour of long-ago lords of Dayspring Castle. It had been little more than a huge lumber room until they came, but now the oak-panelled walls and mix of ancient furniture gathered from other neglected chambers shone with beeswax.

Richly coloured cushions made even awkward old oak chairs comfortable enough to sit and doze in on a winter evening. The fact they were made from the good bits of brocade or velvet curtains too old or damaged to repair probably wouldn’t go down well with the owner of this faded splendour, but she really didn’t care. No doubt Lord Mantaigne would condemn them for making a home here and turn them out tomorrow anyway, but today they had more right to be here than he did. Given the neglect he’d inflicted on his splendid birthright, if there was any justice he’d have no rights here at all.

‘Ah, there you are,’ the man observed from the doorway and she turned to make some sarcastic comment on his acute powers of observation.

‘Heavens,’ she said lamely instead and felt her mouth fall open at the sight of a very different Lord Mantaigne to the man polite society fawned on like fools.

‘I believe “Lawks” was how your cook put it,’ he said, and drat the man, but his grin was pure charm, and suddenly she understood all that fawning after all.

‘Prue’s not my cook, she’s a friend,’ she argued, but there was no bite in her tone as she gazed at perhaps the dirtiest nobleman she’d ever laid eyes on.

He shrugged, and a clump of grey dust-covered cobweb fell from of his once-burnished curls and drifted softly to the threadbare but spotlessly clean Turkey carpet. ‘Whoever she is, she is a wonderful cook if the delicious smells coming from her kitchen are anything to go by.’

‘She is, and they are,’ Polly agreed lamely.

‘She has invited me to eat with you all, once I’ve dislodged the dust of ages from my person and can sit down to it like a civilised human being.’

‘That sounds like her,’ she said, still trying to enmesh her image of the wicked and sophisticated aristocrat she’d hated for so long with this rueful, sweaty and filthy man who seemed very ready to admit the joke was on him.

‘I offered to marry her, but she says she’s already spoken for,’ he added, and she refused to like him—yes, that was it, she simply refused to be charmed. He wasn’t going to subvert Paulina Trethayne with his easy, intimate smiles, or the glitter of mischief in those intensely blue eyes that invited her to laugh with him and bid goodbye to the wary distrust she wanted to keep between them like a shield.

‘It will take you until midnight to get yourself clean enough for that,’ she blurted out, and he laughed as if at a brilliant witticism. She felt it as if he’d reached inside her and jarred her whole being with that one rumble of masculine enjoyment. ‘And I refuse to wait here like a waxwork while you preen and primp and peacock yourself back into a state of suitable splendour and the rest of us go hungry, so you’d best hurry up.’

‘You thought me splendid before I acquired all this dirt then, Miss Trethayne?’ he asked with an ironic bow that lost some of its effect when a twig from some ancient bird’s nest fell on the carpet at his dusty feet and he had to stoop down even further to pick it up.

It would be silly to find it admirable in him to consider whoever had to keep this place clean. Of course she didn’t think he was anything of the kind and reinforced her disapproval with a glower that might be a little overdone. The sight of it certainly seemed to cheer the contrary man for some reason, and he clicked his heels in a mock-military salute, then stood as upright as a soldier on parade.

‘I can quite see why your brothers are terrified of your wrath, Miss Trethayne. You must set very high standards of cleanliness and good behaviour.’

‘They are not terrified of me,’ she told him with the feeling of having been caught kicking puppies, making her meet those blue, blue eyes of his with shock and reproach in her own before she remembered he was a master of manipulating those about him and glared full at him, since he was so determined to get her attention.

‘No? And they seem such well-behaved and sensible lads,’ he lied with a straight face.

Dote on them though she might, she had no illusions about any of her lively and headstrong brothers and nobody had ever accused them of being less than a handful, even when they were on their best behaviour.

‘You know very well they’re nothing of the sort,’ she said dourly.

How had he tricked her into saying any such thing within such a short time of his arrival? She would have sworn to any other outsider that her brothers were the best boys she had ever come across if they even tried to tell her the Trethayne brothers were a touch wild and ought to be confined to the care of a strict schoolmaster until they learned some manners. Now she was admitting they were a trio of noisy and argumentative urchins to her worst enemy and he was her worst enemy, wasn’t he?

‘I like them,’ he claimed, and that was just plain unfair of him.

‘So do I,’ she replied repressively and stared pointedly at the spider about to drop off his elbow onto Lady Wakebourne’s favourite chair. ‘If you don’t go away and take your livestock with you, there won’t be any dinner left for you to devour when you get back from restoring yourself to your usual state of dandified magnificence in an hour or two,’ she told him nastily, but this man brought out the worst in her and that was that.

‘Scared of spiders, Miss Trethayne?’

‘No, only marquises, my lord.’

‘Very sensible, you really wouldn’t want one of us in your hair,’ he said as lightly as if she hadn’t just shot a dart past his armour, but somehow she knew she had and felt a twinge of shame twist in her belly that she refused to consider more closely until he’d gone. She wasn’t scared of him so much as her own reactions to him and neither of them needed to know that just now.

‘Go away,’ she said dourly, and the wretch did with one last, thoughtful look back at her that said he wondered exactly why she wanted him gone so badly. ‘Why were you looking for me?’ she called after him, feeling as if he’d taken some of the air and all the excitement out of the room with him and contrarily wanting it back.

I bet lots of women can’t help themselves whenever he’s around, a bleak, repressive inner voice whispered, but she ignored it as best she could.

‘Because Lady Wakebourne thought you would know where my valise has gone. If you will excuse me, poor Peters is very likely shivering himself into an early grave out in the laundry room right now, since he refuses to enter the castle in a state of nature after his much-needed ablutions. I, of course, have no such gentlemanly scruples and will be perfectly happy to run about the place stark naked as soon as I’ve washed the dust and dirt of the last century or so away and feel restored to my rude self again.’

‘Sam Barker took it up to the South Tower. That’s where all the men sleep,’ she said in a strangled voice she hardly recognised as her own.

‘I must remember to thank him for such a kindness, but I don’t think he’d want me searching the place from top to toe and getting dust everywhere right now, do you?’

‘I’ll find him and ask him to bring it out to you,’ she said in a loud voice she told herself wasn’t in the least bit squeaky with panic as the idea of this particular man appearing in the hall of his ancestors and naked as the day he was born sent a shudder through her that had nothing at all to do with her being cold.

‘My thanks, Miss Trethayne,’ he said as smoothly as if they’d been discussing the weather, then he sauntered away to join poor Mr Peters in the laundry as if he would never dream of wondering how it would feel if they happened to be naked at the same time.

Chapter Four

Polly was glad to be alone as the very idea made her clamp her legs together against a hot rush of wanton excitement at her feminine core that felt sinful and delicious in equal measure. ‘Oh, heavens,’ she husked on a long, expelled breath that felt as if it had come on a very long journey all the way from her boots.

The most appalling images of a naked, sweat-streaked and vital Lord Mantaigne were cavorting about in her head like seductively potent demons now. He was disgusting, she told herself, and in more ways than one. He was certainly physically filthy, and she ought not to find that the least bit appealing in the man. There had even been a streak of ancient grey dust right across the front of his disgracefully open shirt and, come to think of it, that garment had clung to him as if it loved him as well. She could recall exactly how the dust darkened across the bare torso visible under that once-pristine linen and the powdery stuff had clung to the sweat on his tanned and glistening skin like a fond lover.

If she had dared let even a hint of her fascination with his work-mussed person show, he would have played on it as shamelessly as an actor in a melodrama, but even willpower couldn’t control the physical response of her body to his now he’d gone and her wicked imagination had taken over. Of course it was folly to wonder how it would feel to be his equal in sophistication and passion and flirt right back at him, to risk the shame and scandal of being a fallen woman for the absolute pleasure of being such a devastatingly masculine yet civilised and urbane man’s lover. He was an accomplished breaker of women’s hearts and it was good that she was nothing like the females such finicky men of the world chose as their paramours.

She brushed a hesitant, wondering hand tentatively over her breeches and up to her slender waist with the feeling she was leaving stardust in its wake, then she gasped as she realised where her too-vivid imagination was taking her again. So horribly conscious of her own body that she suddenly felt as if it had a life and demands independent of the rest of her, she slammed a door on the image of lordly Lord Mantaigne luxuriating in the makeshift bathing room they’d made in one of the laundries. It would be steamy, the air warm from the fire Dotty would have lit for the comfort of the weary labourers as they got rid of all their dirt, because Dotty had a soft heart under her gruff manner and she openly admitted making men comfortable had been the mission of her youth.

Thank goodness the self-appointed castle laundress was middle-aged and didn’t continue with her life’s work in quite the same way nowadays. The image of his lordship in his tub with a very willing and gleeful female seemed utterly disgusting somehow, as the one of him in it with the likes of her that hesitated on the edge of her thoughts never could be, even though her everyday self wished it was.

‘Oh, no, the valise!’ she yelped and ran out of the room to find Sam Barker before there was the slightest risk of the marquis carrying out his implied threat to parade about the castle naked if someone didn’t produce his clothes in time. ‘Useless dandy,’ she grumbled as soon as she’d run Sam to earth in the kitchen and met his amused gaze as he reassured her the master of the house had already been safely reunited with his clothes and there was nothing for her to panic about.

‘That’s what he thinks,’ she mumbled to herself as she went back upstairs to put out a few of their precious store of wax candles in honour of their unwanted guest.

* * *

‘So, what do you think?’ Tom asked his supposed secretary-cum-agent-cum-lawyer half an hour later.

‘Nobody would think you even knew what a broom looked like now, let alone how to use one,’ Peters told him distractedly as he did his best to shave by the light of a flickering candle.

‘That’s not what I meant,’ Tom told him grumpily, wondering why the world thought him such a peacock. ‘I was asking your ideas about the self-appointed keepers of my castle.’

‘From what I’ve seen so far, they seem a very mixed bag.’

‘True, but I’m ready to defer to your superior knowledge of the criminal classes. Do you think any are active law-breakers?’

Peters seemed to consider that question more seriously as he wiped the last of his whiskers from the blade of his razor and was himself again, whoever that might be. ‘I doubt it,’ he said, as if the fact surprised him as well.

‘So do I,’ Tom said with a preoccupied frown as he used the square of mirror his confederate had vacated to brush his hair back into gleaming order. ‘I suspect Lady Wakebourne would have them marched out of here faster than the cat could lick her ear if she had the slightest suspicion any had gone back to their old ways.’

‘It’s not just that. They respect her and Miss Trethayne. Even that battered old rogue in the gatehouse seemed more concerned about them than his own doubtful claim to employment and a roof over his head.’

‘So why are two ladies living in what should be an abandoned barrack with a pack of reformed rogues and criminals?’ Tom mused as he decided he was ready to face the world outside the castle laundry once again.

‘Some don’t seem the type to have ever been out-and-out rogues, so maybe they were all victims of an unlucky fate.’

‘Maybe, but what sort of circumstances would set two ladies so far apart from their kind? They must have been dire to leave them squatting in such a bleak old barn of a place, scratching a living from whatever they have managed to find here to sustain some sort of life on.’

‘Dire ones indeed,’ Peters said starkly, confirming Tom’s own conclusions.

He frowned at his now-immaculate reflection and came to terms with the idea he couldn’t simply come here, take a look round and walk away again as he had half-hoped when he was given Virginia’s letter ordering him to come here, find out what was amiss, then make up his mind if he wanted to demolish the castle or accept the duties and responsibilities that went with being born the heir of Dayspring Castle.

‘Dire indeed if I meant to bring in a full staff and live here, since they would then have to leave the place.’

‘And you don’t?’

‘Of course not, man. Would I have avoided it like the plague all these years if I had the slightest desire to settle in and play lord of all I survey here?’

‘I really couldn’t say, my lord,’ the supposedly quiet and unassuming Mr Peters said, as if he had his own opinion about Tom’s feelings for the place but was keeping it to himself.

‘Good,’ Tom drawled, squaring his shoulders at the suspicion the man might be right.

* * *

‘Is Lord Mantaigne’s bedchamber ready yet?’ Lady Wakebourne asked Polly from the doorway of the great parlour.

‘It would take an army to make that echoing barrack room ready for him,’ Polly snapped back and felt the new tension in the air now the rightful owner was back in his castle. ‘They can both sleep in the South Tower with the rest of the men,’ she added, knowing all the same that nothing here was ever going to be the same again. ‘We can’t get them into the staterooms fast enough for my taste, but lodging the man in a musty and bat-ridden chamber in the empty part of the house won’t endear us to him in any way.’

‘And we don’t want him to feel more uncomfortable than he has to here.’

‘No, indeed,’ Polly agreed with a weary sigh.

‘Nor should we allow him the chance to form any wrong ideas about a lady residing under his roof, my dear. You must resume your petticoats in the daytime as well as at nights now, Paulina, whether you like them or not.’

‘I don’t. They’re confoundedly restricting and make it well-nigh impossible to for me to do any work,’ Polly complained, knowing her ladyship was right.

Casting a last glance round the comfortable room at the odd family they had made out of a pack of rootless strangers used of an evening, she wondered how many would stay in their own quarters tonight to avoid the puzzle of how the sweepings of the King’s Highway dined with a marquis. Biting back a wistful sigh for yesterday, when they had no idea the impossible was about to happen, she nodded her agreement and bit her lip against a furious protest against the darker whims of fate.

‘Never mind, my dear, it won’t be for long. The boy must loathe the place, given the terrible things the locals whisper about what he endured here as a boy, and this is the first time he’s been near Dayspring in twenty years. He probably won’t be back for another twenty, once he’s done whatever it is he came here to do.’

‘And whatever that might be, he certainly didn’t expect to find us here,’ Polly answered glumly. ‘I can’t imagine why you wrote to his godmother about whatever is going on here. You must have done that months ago, since the old lady has been dead three months,’ she said sharply, as all those nights when she had lain awake worrying about whoever was making incursions into the castle at night reminded her Lady Wakebourne was a devious woman.

‘He is the only person who can tell them to go, my dear. I wasn’t going to risk you losing your temper one day and confronting them, then maybe leaving those boys of yours even more alone in the world than they are already.’

‘Oh, then I suppose I can see your point,’ Polly conceded reluctantly, knowing she had a tendency to act first and think later, although of course a measured risk was perfectly acceptable and she had weighed that one up already and decided she needed more information before taking it.

‘And I am very fond of you, my dear. I want you to be safe and happy as much as any of us.’

‘Thank you, I am very fond of you to,’ Polly admitted.

‘Then there is no harm done between us?’ The lady actually sounded anxious about that and Polly had to nod and admit it.

‘No, but I now know you are a splendid actress and will be very wary of you in future.’

‘I don’t think I’ll take to the stage to repair my fortunes even so. Now run along upstairs and put some petticoats on, my dear, if only for my sake.’

‘Very well, but I still hate them.’

Going back across the courtyard to the women’s quarters, she climbed the stairs to her lofty room and washed hastily. Trying not to give herself time to think too much, she bundled herself into the patched and fraying quilted petticoat, wide overskirt and unfashionably long bodice she wore when she absolutely had to. It felt ancient and impractical, and she hated the corsets she had to wear to make the bodice fit and the curb the heavy skirt put on her long stride so she must mince along or hold them so high they were indecent and defeated the purpose of wearing them in the first place. Without the hoops and panniers the gown was designed for, it hung limply about her long legs, but it was the only gown she’d found that wasn’t so short on her it was more revealing than her breeches, so what couldn’t be cured must be endured.

Until she had come here and discovered the liberty of breeches and boots she must have spent her waking life enduring the wretched things, she supposed with a sigh. As she lifted her skirts to descend the stairs without tumbling down them, she wondered how she’d borne it for so long. She minced impatiently into the housekeeper’s kitchen they used instead of the vast castle kitchens and tried hard not to knock anything over now she felt several feet wider than usual.

‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, girl, you’d look a fright even without the sad state of your hair,’ Lady Wakebourne exclaimed as she turned from stirring a saucepan for Prue with a look of despair at Polly’s unfashionable array.

‘What’s wrong with me now?’ Polly replied defensively.

‘It looks as if you last ran a comb through it about six months ago.’

Polly raised a hand to feel if she was right and realised the hasty plait she’d twisted it into first thing this morning had gone sadly awry and she might as well be wearing a bird’s nest on her head. She felt herself blush at the spectacle she must have made when Lord Mantaigne first laid eyes on her. She wasn’t surprised he’d let his gaze linger on her long legs and what curves she had to her name so impudently now. No, she was, she had to be. His preoccupation with her long limbs proved to her that any reasonably formed female body would do for him to bed a woman, she reminded herself militantly.

‘I’m not primping and preening for any man, let alone him,’ she said, even as the idea of sharing a meal with that finicky, arrogant aristocrat looking as if she had been left out in a tempest for a day made something deep inside her cringe.

‘Don’t worry, I think we would know that, even if you did the rest of us the courtesy of taking a brush and comb to that wild mess now and again.’

‘I’m not going all the way back to my room to try and turn myself into a sweet and docile lady for the marquis’s benefit.’

‘Not much risk of you ever being one of those, Miss Polly.’ The girl stooping over the fire to turn the spit for her sister Prue straightened up as far as she could to eye Polly critically. ‘If you wouldn’t mind watching this for me, your ladyship, I could take Miss Polly along to my room and tame that tangle into something closer to how it ought to look.’

‘Of course, Jane dear. Far be it from me to stand in the way of such a noble undertaking,’ Lady Wakebourne said cheerfully and took over the task with an ease her former friends might find a little distasteful if they could see her. Since they had turned their backs when she found out her husband had gambled away his fortune, Lady Wakebourne’s dowry and a whole lot more before he shot himself, Polly was very glad to have missed out on knowing them.

* * *

‘You have such beautiful hair, Miss Polly,’ Jane said when she finally persuaded Polly to sit still on a three-legged stool in her bedchamber on the other side of their makeshift kitchen from the men’s sleeping quarters, where the heat of the fires at least warded off the chill from the southwest winds and ancient walls left too long without enough fires powerful enough to warm them.

‘It gets in a mess as soon as I’ve finish tying it back every morning.’

‘That’s because it needs thinning here and there and if you’ll let me take a few inches off the ends, I’m sure you won’t find it so hard to manage,’ Jane said shyly as she undid the heavy mass, then brushed and combed it into a crackling and vital cloak about Polly shoulders.

Even her hair seemed imbued with some of her impatience with being primped until suitable for the lord of Dayspring to set his noble eyes on so he wouldn’t be put off his dinner. Polly wondered how long Jane had wanted to be a lady’s maid and it was a hope unlikely to ever come true, given society’s prejudices, so if playing one for a night made her feel better, Polly found she could keep still after all.

‘Do what you like with it then,’ she said with a restless shrug.

‘Only if you promise to sit quiet,’ Jane chided, then produced a pair of sharp scissors and began snipping at Polly’s hair as if shaping it was a work of art. ‘Sit there while I fetch a branch of candles. I can’t see well enough to do this properly,’ Jane said just as Polly was beginning to hope she’d finished.

So Polly had time to sit and wonder why she was doing this. Surely she didn’t want that popinjay to admire her as he might have if their eyes met across a crowded ballroom? She squirmed at the idea of being sized up as the other party in a wild and fleeting affair by a society rake and told herself it was because her seat was too low and rather hard, not because the very thought of Lord Mantaigne made her feel as if a crucial part of her insides might be melting. She despised unprincipled dandies and who could doubt he was one of those when he wore that ridiculously elegant get up as if he was about to take a stroll across Mayfair instead of camp out in a dusty and crumbling castle?

If she’d first seen him sauntering down Bond Street in that exquisitely cut coat, tightly fitting pantaloons and gleaming Hessians she would have shot him a scornful look, then forgotten him as a man of straw. If he’d raised his perfect top hat from his gleaming golden curls and bowed as if he knew her, she would have given him the cold stare of a lady dealing with an overfamiliar gentleman and moved on with a dismissive nod. How she wished she had seen him like that, in his natural orbit and revealed for what he was under the cool light of a London Season.

Except she had only ever heard about such beings in Lady Wakebourne’s tales of former glory. Miss Paulina Trethayne had no youthful rites of passage to look back on; she had never stood on the verge of womanhood, waiting nervously to meet a hopeful youth who might marry her and make her and her children secure for the rest of her life, or might gamble and whore his way through every penny of his fortune and her dowry. She never would now and, since she was already a woman who knew the best way to feel secure in life was to rely on herself; that was just as well. If she came across the Marquis of Mantaigne outside the castle walls it would be as his unequal in every way and she refused to regret it.

So why did a part of her she didn’t like to admit existed long to dance with him at grand society balls and drift about the dance floor of Almack’s Club during a dazzlingly intimate evening of gossip and dancing? The flighty Paulina Trethayne she might have been, if things had been very different, stopped twiddling her thumbs in boredom with the mundane life she had been forced to live beyond the playgrounds of the haut ton

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