The Marquis's Awakening

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.