Housemaid Heiress
‘Strange is too mild a word. After so many years of fighting that genius of a madman, I can’t believe it’s over.’
‘You think Bonaparte mad?’
‘Not in the sense poor old Farmer George is, but anyone who seeks to rule the world is unhinged.’
‘I see what you mean.’
‘Do you, Miss Smith?’ The light mockery was back in his voice and Thea wondered if anyone was allowed to catch more than a glimpse of the real Captain Prestbury.
‘Only a fool refuses to acknowledge his enemy’s strengths.’
‘And you are far from being a fool.’
If only that were true. ‘Neither am I very wise.’
‘Yet, does a hard start explain your contradictions, I wonder?’
Now his voice was speculative and Thea felt her heart race for a very different reason than it had in Marcus Ashfield’s company. Both cousins were dangerous in their own way.
‘I must leave you, sir, lest we be seen.’
His grip was surprisingly firm for a man who was recovering from dreadful wounds. Most unattached females in Wiltshire were in love with this tall, dark and handsome Hussar, but she just felt a twinge of regret that they could never be friends. His cousin had dealt with any weaknesses she had for rogues ready to break her heart and leave without a backward look.
‘Just a warning from one adventurer to another,’ he continued, his grip impersonal and his gaze steady.
‘I’m no adventuress.’
‘Yet you’re not what you seem either, are you, Miss Smith?’
‘I am exactly what I seem, sir. Someone who needs a job to stave off destitution.’
‘Those are the plain facts,’ he agreed, but she could still see the glint of cynicism in blue eyes that were dark in the distant light of the flames. ‘Yet it is my business to look beneath them, even if my intentions are pure for once.’
‘You can hardly expect me to believe that, now can you, Captain?’ she told him, with a significant glance at his long fingers fettering her wrist.
He chuckled and let her go, trusting his words to keep her.
‘You have a way of looking adversity in the face and defying it that says you are a kindred spirit, Miss Smith. Would I had met you on the dance floor.’
‘You must have a touch of fever, Captain. Housemaids hardly ever go to grand parties.’
‘I observe, my dear. I don’t report unless my commanders decree it, and even if you were Boney’s best spy it could hardly signify now.’
‘Well that’s a relief.’
Thea saw him smile by the intermittent light, but he was sober and unsmiling when he finally came to the point. ‘My cousin Marcus is a fool, but a very determined one,’ he said gently.
She held up a hand in protest, feeling as if someone was probing a wound as tender as the one finally healing in his arm.
‘I’m not always so fast asleep as I seem, Miss Smith. With the number of stitches in my arm, I am often pressed to do more than doze.’
‘You have the habit of deceit, Captain,’ she told him disapprovingly.
‘True, but perhaps we had best not to examine that trait too deeply, since you share it. At first I was sparing the great oaf worry by staying still, then I nearly ended up blushing like a schoolgirl.’
‘Serves you right.’
‘True, but I was glad you finally remembered my presence.’
‘I recalled my own good sense, you had nothing to do with it.’
‘I’m suitably mortified, but nevertheless you did well. Marcus decided long ago to have nothing to do with love. I doubt anything less would seem worthy of throwing your bonnet over the windmill.’
‘I realised that for myself.’
‘Yet it can’t hurt to say he’s as stony hearted as I’m thought to be.’
‘No, Captain, the gossips are wrong.’
‘That they’re not. Marcus is quieter than me, but he’s still dangerous, and your sex has a way of yearning for the unattainable.’
‘That’s not what I meant,’ she said softly and reached a gentle hand up to touch his still-thin cheek. ‘Lord Strensham is essentially cold, but I think you, Captain, are far from it.’
He looked uncomfortable, more used to brazening out misdeeds than fielding praise. ‘I leave at the end of the week to continue my recovery at my grandmother’s house in Bath,’ he said with every sign of revulsion.
‘Poor Captain Prestbury.’
‘Oh, confound it, why not call me Nick?’
‘Because I’m the under-housemaid.’
‘My friends call me by my given name.’
‘Thank you, Nick, but when we meet again, please forget you ever set eyes on me?’
‘Aye, but a letter to the Dowager Lady Prestbury in Sydney Place will find me.’
‘I will remember,’ she said softly and with a gesture of farewell, went to find the solitude she needed. If only she had a brother like Nick Prestbury, how different her life would be.
At the end of April the Darraine family left for the capital to enjoy the Season and to join the peace celebrations. Although most of the senior staff went too, the rest stayed at Rosecombe. Which could hardly be described as a holiday, Thea thought one sunny day at the end of June, considering the housekeeper would pounce on any neglect of their duties. Yet, if she made up her work in double time, a few minutes could be stolen from the day.
‘You’ll get caught one day you will,’ Carrie, the head housemaid, informed her cheerfully when she came upon her second lieutenant illicitly reading one of Sir Edward’s beloved books.
‘Caught dusting the library? That’s what we maids do.’
‘The rest of us don’t read the books while we’re dusting them, but you’d best be more careful, now.’
‘Why?’ Thea got on very well with the cheerful country girl and doubted her warning was a threat to reveal her secret.
‘Family’s coming home, and bringing guests with them.’
‘I thought they were off to Brighton.’
‘So did I, but we was both wrong. His lordship and the Captain will join them later, or so Mrs Meldon says, and she wants their rooms got ready before we start on all the others, just in case one of them takes it into his head to arrive before we’re ready.’
Thea’s heart thumped at the mere mention of the new Viscount Strensham, but she told herself not to be a fool. He had made his feelings, or lack of them, clear last time they met. He was just another stranger who would fill her days with work as Lady Lydia had promised.
‘I’d best hurry up in here, then,’ she said calmly and put her book back.
‘I’ll help, then we’ll find Jane and make a start. Let’s hope the missus don’t expect us to do it all ourselves, or we’ll be dead on our feet.’
Plenty of help was forthcoming, but Thea was soon wondering if they might not all drop from exhaustion, just running about satisfying the guests’ constant demands. Lady Lydia and Sir Edward Darraine cultivated a very odd set of friends. A bullying and humourless heiress whose father made his money in the cloth trade in the north; a lively widow with a merry eye; and a very young lady so shy she hardly spoke. They didn’t seem to have much in common and would surely have been better entertained by the protracted victory celebrations the newspapers were full of.
Miss Rashton’s demands and constant complaints about country servants and their uncouth ways was wearing everyone’s nerves to tatters. Thea kept out of her way, and tried to consider the wretched female her punishment for once also being a demanding and inconsiderate miss. Then the maids were ordered to help in the hall one day and the reason for the lady’s presence became clear as glass.
She saw a tall and immaculately dressed gentleman climbing down from a hired carriage, just as an artlessly disordered Miss Rashton came drifting down the stairs as if by pure chance. For a moment Thea’s ears buzzed as if she might actually be in danger of fainting, but she refused to give him the satisfaction. Not by one look or gesture would she reveal she even remembered him, she told herself, and folded her hands behind her back where nobody could see them shaking.
‘Oh, the dear viscount is here,’ the chief heiress breathed in the softest tones anyone at the Park had heard since she arrived. ‘Now we shall be merry again,’ she added, with an eager sparkle in her hard eyes, and the unscrupulous rogue greeted her with a wicked smile and a bow that would have done credit to a Bond Street Beau.
‘Miss Rashton, and Mrs Fall,’ Lord Strensham said, bowing just as gracefully and smiling just as wolfishly at the widow, who emerged from the music room where she had probably been hiding from the tone-deaf Miss Rashton. ‘London was a veritable desert without you, ladies, so I escaped Prinny’s celebrations as soon as I could.’
‘Indeed, it must be nigh unbearable by now, what with all the noise and heat and that vulgar crowd turning out to see the Sovereigns off,’ Miss Rashton said rather wistfully.
‘Yes, you would not have liked it at all,’ he returned, and Thea wondered if she was the only one who detected mockery in his grey eyes.
He was here to marry one of these creatures. At the moment she fervently hoped that he saddled himself with Miss Rashton for the rest of their days. Such a cynical alliance would suit him perfectly.
She stood, head bowed and waiting for orders, trying to pretend the man standing so close and so remote meant nothing to her. Her battle-worn major had become the sort of fastidious aristocrat who might turn a menial into a rabid Jacobin. This cynical rake really didn’t appeal to her at all. Or at least not very much.
His broad shoulders were encased in a coat of dark blue superfine that fitted him without a wrinkle, his cravat was perfection and his linen as spotless as if he had just stepped out of his dressing room. She was in an excellent position to know that his mirror-polished Hessians were unblemished by so much as a speck of dust, and his pantaloons were designed to emphasise rather than disguise the muscular strength of his powerful legs. If he had become as idle as he looked, very soon he would run to fat, she concluded vengefully, and just remembered in time that she was not superior enough a servant to give vent to a sniff of disapproval.
‘Before I join the delights of the drawing room, you really must let me get rid of my dirt, ladies,’ he drawled and Thea longed for the pail of dirty water she had recently washed down the drain, after scrubbing the pristine marble under his fastidious feet.
No, he could bring all the heiresses in Britain into his cousin’s house and shamelessly flirt with them in front of her, then cynically make his choice for all she cared. She set her face in an indifferent mask as the butler ordered her to help with his lordship’s luggage. Her gaze fixed on the middle distance as was only proper and she spared the tall figure at the centre of all this fuss not another glance; he wasn’t worth it, after all.
Chapter Five
Wishing he could be as serenely indifferent to the little wretch as she appeared to be to him, Marcus ran upstairs and tried to reorder his world again. It had cost him weeks of turmoil to forget the hurt in a pair of unique turquoise eyes, and harden himself to this task. He would not let the mere sight of her throw him off course now. Three months spent turning this way and that like an animal in a trap, and he was held as fast as he had been when he began. Still, now he knew he had no alternative but to marry the money he needed to drag his estates out of River Tick.
Despite the immaculate attire that made Thea itch to muss and muddy his splendour, he stripped off and shaved himself once more, before donning pristine breeches and a spotless linen shirt. He was absently tying his neckcloth when he reminded himself of Nick’s cynical advice.
‘Look like a ragtag without sixpence, Marco, and you will be taken for the desperate man that you are. Dress like a top o’the trees and you will be fighting off the rich little darlings in droves.’
A smile fleetingly softened his austere mouth. Few believed Nick had a kindly bone in his body, but gain his loyalty and he was steadfast as granite.
Nick had come to town to consult the doctors about his arm, and ordered his own tailor to outfit his cousin. ‘And if he don’t pay you out of his ill-gotten gains, send the bill to me and I’ll dun him instead.’
He had gone on to countermand the modest wardrobe Marcus had ordered, and thus he stood here, dressing in fine feathers to charm the gold out of the heiresses’ dower chests. He probably deserved Miss Rashton he decided, and at least her iron determination to wed a title would work to his advantage. He could make her a viscountess and she could save his bankrupt estates. They might have been made for one another.
He shrugged himself into the elegant waistcoat and beautifully tailored coat Nick insisted no self-respecting fortune hunter should be seen without, and wondered what his lordly ancestors would have made of their latest descendant. Not much, he determined grimly. The Ashfields had been a shrewd race, until his father gambled, drank and caroused his way through every penny he could lay his hands on, and a good many that should have been safely out of his reach.
Hastily running a brush through his thick dark hair, Marcus knew he looked as elegant as a gentleman could without the services of a skilled valet, and decided it was high time he wrote to his lawyer again. Surely something must have escaped his father’s headlong pursuit of pleasure? After all, his grandfather had outlived his only son by ten days, so it wasn’t as if the Honourable Julius Ashfield had ever inherited the title and estates. He had been borrowing against expectations, so how had he managed to beggar his heirs?
Preoccupied with this dilemma, Marcus forgot his promise to join the ladies in the drawing room and marched downstairs with a determination his former brigade would have recognised, even if the light-hearted Major Ashfield they knew off-duty had vanished along with his dark green uniform. He was halfway down the room in search of a decent pen and hot pressed paper when he finally took in the picture before him.
The humblest female in the entire household was taking her ease in Ned’s favourite chair. Marcus blinked and wondered if too many sleepless nights and occasionally drinking too deep to escape harsh reality, had caught up with him. No, his eyesight was sharp and his senses stubbornly unclouded, so the troublesome wench really was sitting reading some solemn tome with such intense concentration she hadn’t noticed him come in.
‘And what the devil are you up to now?’ he barked, and watched her start violently with an unworthy sense of satisfaction.
A faint feeling of shame made his expression all the more forbidding as he stood in judgement over the female he had fought so hard to forget. How could the annoying little witch be so wrapped up in her studies, when he had been so ridiculously conscious of her every move the instant he stepped over the threshold?
Thea glowered back at him, Lord Strensham was a fortune hunter of the worst sort—a man who could easily earn his own wealth if he could be bothered to do a day’s work now and again. To prove that he meant nothing to her, she had slipped away from the furore his coming had caused and taken this ridiculous risk. Ten minutes of forgetfulness were needed to erase the image of dashing, self-sufficient Major Ashfield from her mind, and set foppish, useless Lord Strensham in his place.
‘Improving my mind,’ she snapped as he continued to wait for her explanation like examining counsel. ‘An example you might follow, if only you could spare the time.’
‘And you obviously spend yours avoiding the job you’re paid to do. I should never have told Lyddie you needed work, for you quite obviously don’t value her kindness in taking you without a reference.’
Maybe he was right. If he had let her slip into the woods that day, she would never have suffered the hurt and humiliation of being rejected by this handsome idiot. Of course she might also have starved to death or been caught by the Winfordes by now, but sometimes even that seemed better than yearning for a man who did not want her. It was his fault of course—if he had stayed away just a little bit longer she would have forgotten him. Anyway, he was changed, if the trappings of a fashionable fortune hunter and the indolent, impudent manner he affected were anything to go by.
‘Her ladyship knows we’re run ragged by that virago of yours.’
He looked conscious, and so he should. If he was really planning to wed the confounded female for the sake of her bulging coffers, he was selling himself short. After all, if a fortune was all he wanted, he could have married her. By reminding herself that she would have been storing up a lifetime of heartache, she forced her numb legs into supporting her and prepared to make a dignified exit.
She watched as his grey gaze ran lazily over her rather crumpled uniform and found her lacking. How she wished she dared to slap the suggestion of a smile from his handsome face. Spoilt and silly Miss Alethea Hardy would have fallen headlong for such a dangerous, damn-your-eyes rogue, but prosaic Hetty Smith was surely immune to his dubious charm.
‘Tiresome heavy these great books, ain’t they, your lordship?’
‘So you sat down and waited for that one to jump back onto the shelf?’ he asked quietly, a hint of laughter vanished from his grey eyes as if it had never been and she shivered, despite the growing heat of the day.
His deep voice sounded as if he had permanently rasped it barking orders on the battlefield, she mused, feeling for one shocking moment as if his baritone rumble had found an echo in her very bones. She caught herself remembering how seductive it was when he pitched it low and lover-like and rapidly slammed the door on such idiotic memories.
‘No, my lord, and now I must be about my work again,’ she said, meeting his sceptical gaze with a blankness she hoped would signal her indifference.
Too well acquainted with her own features to find them in any way remarkable, she could make nothing of his frozen stillness as his grey eyes met hers. Yet a whisper of that forbidden longing brushed down her tingling spine like a lover’s touch once again. He turned to gaze at the Wiltshire countryside through the long windows. His grey eyes were so wintry when he fixed them on her again that she had to control an urge to shrink away.
‘I need to get on,’ she said truthfully.
‘Then stop treating me like a flat and tell me what you’re up to.’
Heaven forbid! ‘Her ladyship will need me any minute,’ she told him with a perplexed expression that should have told him she was innocent.
Lord Strensham’s reflexes were so good that her wrist was caught in an iron grip before she had time to take evasive action. She held as still as a statue and refused to struggle with him like a country maid in a bad play. Yet the touch of his warm fingers on her bare flesh sent an insidious streak of warmth jagging up her arm to earth itself in the most unwelcome places, and she shivered with superstitious dread before bravely meeting his eyes again. If only she was as indifferent to his touch as she had been to Nick Prestbury’s, she thought hazily, but it seemed there was no point wishing for the moon.
‘I don’t think my cousins will be downstairs betimes if the lady you refer to has been running the household round as you say. Since you don’t look like any ladies’ maid I ever came across, I rather doubt Lyddie will need you either,’ he said silkily as he ran his mocking gaze over the housemaid’s uniform no self-respecting dresser would be seen dead in.
Feeling the hot colour stain her cheeks, Thea could not govern her reaction to his touch. Lately she had shrunk from any contact with the male sex, managing to avoid the roving eyes of both visiting masters and their servants by keeping her head down and disappearing into her ill-fitting, hand-me-down clothes. Lord Strensham’s less than lover-like grasp on her wrist sent her wayward heartbeat dancing as if performing a waltz at Almack’s.
It was perfectly ridiculous, this terrible need to have him kiss her again, she told herself. Secretly longing for him to draw her nearer and satisfy this feral desire was folly. She controlled a warm shiver as his strong hand gentled on her slender wrist and sparked those ridiculous curls of heat into life. They were worse than strangers and must remain so. There was an unbridgeable gulf between them, and she ordered herself brusquely to stop staring up at him like a mooncalf.
‘And to think I was warned about gentlemen like you,’ she snapped.
He dropped her hand as if it burnt him and jerked backwards so violently he was in danger of being overset for a moment. His dark brows snapped together, his eyes fierce as a hawk’s and his firm mouth set in a hard line. At least he was himself again; the drawling fop banished by the raw reality of what lay between them, however he tried to deny it, and she tried not to exult at the transformation.
No, she was ruined in the eyes of the world and he didn’t want her even as Hetty Smith, foundling! Thea gasped at the bitter memory of that day at the crossroads and almost shrank away from him, shocked at her own stupidity in laying herself open to such hurt a second time. She stood and faced him, raising her chin to spark dumb defiance at him; set on defying him even if it cost her the place she needed so badly.
‘You know I don’t trifle with innocents,’ he ground out, as if the very idea outraged his peculiar notions of honour. ‘But if you trap any more unwary gentlemen in otherwise empty rooms you won’t be one of those for very much longer, you foolish child.’
Child—how dare he? Thea gritted her teeth and managed to remember why she had to stay here undetected for at least two more months. By dint of promising herself that she would seek him out the moment she came of age—and give him her unvarnished opinion of his dubious morals and scurvy manners—she somehow mastered her fury. Unfortunately a mental picture of him, faced with a vaguely familiar female haranguing him over the breakfast table, presented itself to her inner eye, and an appreciative chuckle escaped her before she could check it.
For a second his remote façade seemed about to crack and his chilly grey eyes warmed, as if he too realised how ridiculous they must look, facing one another across Sir Edward Darraine’s library like duellists. Then his expression became bleak and unreadable again, even as all manner of forbidden questions trembled on her unruly tongue. She blinked to rid her mind of a ridiculous image of those grey eyes hot with passion, a smile of infinite promise on a firm mouth that had suddenly become sensual rather than hard and angry, as he moved ever nearer to her own waiting one and…and nothing!
‘I ain’t got all day to waste gossiping, even if you have, m’lord.’
‘No, I dare say you have work to catch up on.’
‘Most likely I have at that.’
‘Just make sure you don’t get caught next time, Hetty.’
‘There won’t be a next time,’ she assured him emphatically, and swore privately that it was true.
Some risks were not worth taking twice, and my Lord Strensham was one of them.
‘If I catch you out in one more misdeed, your mistress will hear of it,’ he warned and his mistrust hurt.
‘Maybe she’ll wonder why you care,’ she was stung into replying pertly, wondering why that threat tormented her so much she had to blink back tears.
They could never be more than master and housemaid after all, the Winfordes had seen to that.
‘Try that tack and you’ll soon find out your mistake, my enterprising little doxy, and maybe I was mistaken about that innocence after all,’ he ground out harshly, and she was helpless in his powerful embrace before she had even registered the fact that he had moved closer.
Lost for words and even breath as the potent reality of being locked in his arms once more hit her, she forced air into her protesting lungs. Breathing in the scent of clean linen, warm male and fine broadcloth, she forgot all else. Strength so certain it knew nothing about force wrapped her round and she had the most absurd desire to nuzzle deeper into his arms and forget all her troubles, even as common sense was vainly ordering her to drag herself out of them by whatever means needed, fair or foul.