Practical Widow to Passionate Mistress
Meg shivered and found to her shame and shock that it was partly a shudder of sensuality. What on earth was the matter with her? Perhaps it was simply the unfamiliar shipboard world, the freedom, for a little while, from disapproving stares and whispers.
A tap on the door. Johnny with the hot water. Meg ducked behind the curtain, glad of a distraction from her thoughts.
‘Put that can by the screen so Mrs Brandon can reach it,’ Ross instructed the boy. ‘And pour me some coffee. You can come back in half an hour with more hot water.’
A wash in hot water was a pleasure. In water someone else had heated and carried, it was luxury. By dint of contortions that would not have been out of place in Astley’s Amphitheatre, Meg managed to sponge herself all over and felt her spirits rise. Her water-soaked gown had dried, the worse for wear, but not looking as bad as she feared.
When she emerged Ross was propped up in bed, one large hand enveloping a mug of coffee. The aroma curled rich and strong through the air.
‘I’ll go and have my breakfast with the other passengers. And get Johnny to bring you some food down with the hot water. When I get back we can look at your leg.’
‘Can we?’
‘Yes, we can. I want you to have a good look at the wound so you understand my concerns. Perhaps you will take care of yourself better, then. You really do not deserve to keep that leg.’
Irritated with him now, she stuffed her hair into a net, tied her shawl around her shoulders and went out, telling herself that she misheard the muttered, It scarce matters, that she caught as the door closed.
It seemed a long time since that stew last night and the prospect of exchanging civil conversation with the other passengers was pleasant out of all proportion to the occasion. Just the brief contact last night as she had been greeted, had mingled while she collected their supper, had been enjoyable.
How long was it since she had behaved like a lady? Since just before Vittoria, of course, when, as a junior officer’s wife, she had a certain status. After James’s death, she became merely the scandalous woman who had lived in sin with a man. A few of the regimental wives had believed that she really did not know her marriage had been bigamous, but others were prepared to believe she knew perfectly well. They had all shunned her. And when she had taken refuge with Peter Ferguson and had lowered herself to nursing wounded common soldiers, then of course she was utterly beyond the pale.
It had seemed strange to her then, and still did, that it was as shocking that she tended to brave men in pain and distress as it was that she was apparently living in sin. Perhaps the sense of betrayal, the shock, had been so great that their attitude had hardly hurt. It was James’s betrayal that wounded her, kept her using her married name in a desperate attempt to deny this had happened.
Signora Rivera, surrounded by three of her older children, beckoned her to a place opposite them at the long table and she made an effort to shake off the ghosts of the past and smile. ‘How is young José, signora?’
‘Much recovered, I thank you, Signora Brandon. In fact, I am having much trouble keeping him in his bed. Fortunately my maid can watch him while she tends to little Rosa. And how is your brave husband?’
‘Quite well, signora, although he must rest today. He has a wound in his leg.’
‘You have been married long?’ Signora Rivera buttered toast, her eyes bright with curiosity. Meg told herself that she was unaccustomed to female company and that it was only natural that Signora Rivera would want to gossip to pass the journey. She controlled a natural impulse to recoil from the probing.
‘It seems like only yesterday,’ she said with a laugh and the other woman laughed too, accepting the reply as a jest before pouring out the story of her journey to England to join her husband, a wine importer.
Her meal eaten, Meg took a turn around the deck. She had to clutch her shawl against the brisk wind and her eyes watered as she squinted to try to catch a glimpse of coast. But they were well out into the Bay by now and perhaps would not see land again until they passed Brittany.
When she judged that Ross would have safely finished washing and shaving and eaten his breakfast Meg went back below decks. The cabin door was unlocked and when she entered she found him standing by the porthole, his legs encased in the loose white cotton trousers the sailors wore and wearing one of his better shirts, open at the neck and with the sleeves rolled up.
The purely visceral jolt of desire at the sight of broad shoulders tapering to taut hips and the sheer, powerful size of him brought her to a standstill. And then, before she could completely recover herself, he turned and it was the same dark, dangerous face, the same cold eyes, and the desire turned to something more like anger.
‘What the devil do you think you are doing?’ The door banged behind her as she marched in to confront him. ‘I told you to stay in bed and rest and here you are—’
He raised one brow and the slant of his eyes looked even more satanic than usual. ‘Your language shocks me, Mrs Brandon.’
‘And you shock me!’ she retorted, finding in the excuse to lecture him a refuge from the decidedly contradictory feelings that were unsettling her. ‘Take those trousers off and get back to bed.’
With an obedience that was patently provocative his hands went to the fall of the trousers. It seemed that just as she had got over her fright, so he had moved from worrying about her fears to actively provoking her. No doubt it appealed to his dark humour. As he undid the buttons the trousers started to slide from his hips. It was not funny.
‘No! Let me go out first, for goodness’ sake.’ If he so much as chuckles, she thought grimly, I’ll… But, of course, he did no such thing. Major Brandon did not smile, let alone laugh, she remembered when she was out in the passage, her back flat against the door.
It was shocking how arousing the sight of those trousers sliding down had been. Yesterday she had seen the man stark naked, and although she had certainly been able to admire his fine physique, it had not disturbed her half as much as what had just transpired.
It was because he was conscious now and fully aware of what he was doing—which had to be provoking her, punishing her for having him at her mercy when he was already seething with frustration over his injury. It was not attempted seduction. There was no heat in that dark stare, no amorous intent in his gestures and she believed him when he explained what had happened that morning.
The wood was rough under her knuckles as she tapped on the door. ‘Are you in bed yet?’
‘Yes,’ he said, amiably enough as far as one could tell through half an inch of panelling.
‘Where did you get those trousers?’ She walked past him without a glance to open her medical bag. She would not give him the satisfaction of looking at him. ‘From Johnny, I suppose.’
‘Yes. They are practical,’ Ross said indifferently. ‘But it hardly matters.’
The contents of the medical bag blurred out of focus. Four words, yet they told her so much. His indifference was not about trousers, or her presence or their cramped accommodation. Anyone else might read merely annoyance at her interference or weariness after a bad night in the way he said those few words. But they betrayed something else, something that explained his dark mood and unsmiling face.
She had heard that tone before in the voices of men who were exhausted from battle and pain, men who would not have taken action to end their own lives but who were beyond minding if someone else did. It was the voice of a man who hardly cared whether he lived or died and it was all of a piece with the way he had neglected his leg, the darkness in his gaze. But it was not battle fatigue that had brought him to this, nor the pain of his leg. Something deeper had wounded him.
She spread a towel on the trunk and laid out what she needed, filled a bowl with water and set it by the bed, her hands steady, her thoughts reeling. It was not just his leg that needed saving, it seemed. If helping drag him from the river yesterday was to have any value, then she had to hope he could find something to live for as well.
‘It has not bled.’ She lifted back the sheet above the bandage, laid her hand on the bare skin just at the edge of the linen bindings and felt his flesh contract at the touch. ‘It is not inflamed, or over-hot.’ Ross made no reply as she undid the knots and unwrapped the bandage, finally lifting away the pad directly over the wound.
‘That looks better,’ she said, bending her head to sniff discreetly, hoping he did not realise what she was doing. ‘Look now, it is less swollen. It is important to keep it clean and to exercise very gently. Apparently the blood must continue to flow in the muscles all around in order to help it heal.’
‘No sign of mortification, then?’ Ross asked, as casually as if he was enquiring what was for dinner, not establishing whether she was going to deliver a death sentence or, at the very least, tell him his leg would have to come off.
‘No.’ Meg sprinkled basilicum powder over the wound, laid on a fresh pad and began to bandage it again. ‘I will leave this for a couple of days now and tomorrow you may begin to walk on it again.’ He made no comment so she risked a little more. ‘I suppose we will be at sea three or four days. By the time we dock it should be much more comfortable, although you should not ride even then.’
‘No doubt I would have hired a post chaise in any case,’ Ross observed, as though he had given no thought at all to the practicalities of his arrival in England.
As if he expects there to be no future. The thought made her shiver. For herself, she had everything planned out: a cheap but decent lodging in Falmouth for a night or two while she recovered from the journey and accustomed herself to England. And then she was going straight to Martinsdene and Bella and Lina. But her imagination would not take her beyond that, beyond that first embrace, the tears. They had to be all right, she told herself as she had every time she had thought of them, day in and day out. The silence was because Papa destroyed her letters, that was all.
Ross Brandon, it seemed, had looked no further than getting on to this ship. And a ship was the perfect mode of transport for a man who did not want to make decisions. You got on it and it took you where it was going—no opportunities to change your mind, vary your route or interfere with its direction until you arrived in port.
‘Is it a long journey to your home from Falmouth?’ She tied the final knots and pulled back the sheet.
‘A long way home?’ Ross turned his heavy gaze on her as though she had asked a deeply philosophical question that he must ponder with care. ‘Thirteen years,’ he said at last.
Chapter Four
Meg was staring at him as though he had said something strange. ‘Thirteen years,’ she repeated eventually. ‘But how long by road?’
Ross shrugged. He was not going to explain his choice of words. Until they had left his lips he had not realised what he was going to say. ‘Not far, although the roads are narrow.’ It was not miles that separated him from the place where he had been born, it was guilt and loss and the man he had become because of that.
‘And where is your home?’ Meg persisted. She was packing away her bag again, apparently engrossed in the task. But the question had not been casual.
‘I am going to a village some distance outside Falmouth, on the Roseland Peninsula.’ It was easier to answer her than to evade her questions. Social conversation seemed difficult, as though he were speaking in a foreign language that he had not quite mastered the grammar for. And yet he had never been an unsocial man, not until the last few months when the reality of his future had begun to close in around him as a duty as heavy as chains. A bullet in the leg had removed any last lingering illusion of choice that he could stay with his beloved Rifles. His fate was plain: go back to where he had been bitterly unhappy and take over the reins from a father he disliked while surrounded by the ghosts that would never leave him.
‘How lovely that sounds.’ Meg straightened up and scanned the cabin, apparently looking for trifling signs of disorder as she folded his new trousers, put away the towel and twitched the corner curtain into place. ‘I am looking forward to arriving in Falmouth. I have always wanted to see the West Country and the coast, ever since I found a ridiculous novel about pirates and smugglers in the charity box.’ She smiled, apparently amused at the memory of her youthful self. ‘I read it secretly at night, straining my eyes and filling my head with tales of adventure and secret coves.’
‘I was seventeen when I left,’ Ross said. ‘Hardly an age when the beauties of the countryside are of much interest. But I did explore caves and climb cliffs and learn to swim in the sea.
‘But escape and the army were all that had truly interested me then. I knew I could shoot better than anyone for miles around despite my age. I’d haunted the footsteps of my father’s head keeper Tregarne by day, and I sneaked out to spend nights with Billy Gillan, a poacher.’ He closed his eyes, recalling the thrill; it had not all been unhappiness. ‘I could bring down a pheasant or a pigeon and I could stalk game unseen and evade Tregarne’s men as easily as the crafty old rogue who taught me.’
‘It will be good to return to the peace of the countryside, then, to be away from war and noise and killing.’
‘No.’ The thought of the quiet, the lack of the purpose he understood, appalled him. ‘The Rifle Brigade was what I dreamed of, a chance to use and hone my skill. The countryside taught me, that is all.’ The thought of the silence and the memories made him shudder. Strange that he had never anticipated that, far from becoming hardened to death as he had expected, it would come to haunt him. Other young men started out shaken by their first experience of battle or of killing the enemy by sniping from cover. Gradually they became used to it, indifferent. But for him it seemed as though it was the other way around and the horror had grown, slowly, insidiously until he felt as though Death himself walked constantly at his shoulder and sighted along the barrel of his rifle whenever he took aim. But then he had left a legacy of death behind him in England.
‘I suppose young men are interested in other things,’ Meg agreed. ‘Do you have a large family waiting for you?’
‘No one.’ He said it matter of factly and was unprepared for the sadness that transformed Meg’s face.
‘I’m so sorry.’
‘There is no need for you to be. My mother died eighteen months after I joined the army. My younger brother six years later. My father four months ago.’ Said flatly like that it betrayed no embarrassing emotion at all.
‘I have two sisters.’ Meg sat down and began to shake out his shirts, checking each for tears or loose buttons. Ross contemplated telling her that she should not be valeting him, but if she was busy it kept that clear gaze off his face and he could watch her, which was curiously soothing. ‘I am the middle one. Celina, the younger, is sweet and biddable and very good. Arabella, the elder, is practical and kind and sensible.’
‘Like you.’ It was a surprise to see her blush.
‘I had to learn to be practical.’ Meg tugged at a button and then apparently decided it was secure. ‘I used to be the dreamer, the romantic one. I was always in scrapes, always in trouble with Papa.’As he watched she put down the shirt for a moment and spread her right hand, palm up, looking at it as if seeing something that was no longer there. She shivered and picked up the sewing again.
‘But you married your true love in the end? Your childhood sweetheart, no doubt.’ How charming. How very romantic.
‘Yes.’ Meg nodded, her head bent over her sewing roll, apparently not noticing the sneer in his voice. ‘I eloped. Bella helped me, which was brave of her.’ She apparently found the cotton she was seeking and began to thread a needle, squinting at the eye in concentration. ‘But I am sure Papa would never guess she would do anything so dreadful, so I do not think she would have suffered for it. I do hope not.’
‘Suffered for it? Your father was very severe?’
‘Oh, yes, although it was usually me who got the whippings. Bella was too sensible to annoy him and Lina too timid. One thing that convinced me to go was that I was sure life would be much saf…quieter for my sisters with me not there to infuriate Papa.’
Safer, was what she almost said. And the tyrant whipped her? A young girl? It was his right, of course, in law. A father was lord of his household. He could still recall the bite of the switch on the numerous occasions when his own transgressions had been found out. Boys were always being chastised and he bore his father no ill will for that. But the thought of someone taking a switch to that slim frame, that tender skin, sickened him. What sort of man beat a woman? A girl?
‘And they are all right now? They have married, left home?’
‘I do not know. I wrote, often, but I never heard from either of them. I expect Papa stopped the letters.’
‘But that is where you will go as soon as we land?’
‘I—ouch!’ Meg dropped the needle and sucked her thumb. ‘Yes. But I will not arrive on the vicarage doorstep, begging to be taken back.’ Her voice held a hard edge he had never heard before, not even when she had been angry with him. But when Ross looked closely at her face all he could see was concentration as she whipped a section of torn hem into place.
‘Why not hire a reliable man, a Bow Street Runner, perhaps, to go and make enquiries?’ Ross asked. ‘That will put your mind at rest without you having to undertake the journey.’
She folded the shirt and added it to the pile, shaking her head. ‘No. I want to go myself, at once.’
‘But your in-laws, surely they will help you?’ Ross found he was becoming positively outraged over the fact that Meg was on her own. Which was ridiculous. She was an independent adult woman and what she did was no affair of his.
‘I had eloped,’ she said simply, although her eyes were dark with emotions that seemed to go far beyond her words. ‘And they blamed me for leading James astray.’ Ross felt a stirring of puzzlement. It was a long time since he had been in England, but surely the fact that she had married would have squashed the little scandal of a vicar’s daughter eloping.
‘They made their position very clear when I wrote to tell them what had happened,’ she continued with a shrug. ‘I couldn’t even bring them a grandchild. Now, of course, I am quite beyond the pale with everyone, although I am not sure whether it was sharing a tent with Dr Ferguson or soiling my hands by tending the wounded that most scandalised the ladies of the regiment. No, I must make myself a new life.’
The day passed slowly. It was hard to accept inactivity, to have the comparative silence of the ship after the bustle of camp and, perhaps most of all, the absence of duties to keep him focused on the here and now, to give some purpose to life. And without something to keep him occupied all he had to think about was the alien English world and its inescapable responsibilities and memories that waited for him.
Meg seemed to find plenty to keep herself busy, although he suspected their meagre combined wardrobes would not hold enough mending to occupy her for another day. She came and went, leaving him tactfully alone for half an hour at a time. He must get up tomorrow, whatever she said, and give her privacy. It must be hard, managing modestly behind that scrap of curtain. But she never once complained—not at the confined space, the gloom of the cabin, the insidious smell of the bilges. Or his dark mood.
Meg returned in the late afternoon to report heavier seas—which he could feel in the roll of the ship and the creaking that seemed to come from every part of it. ‘But the sun is shining and apparently we are making good time,’ she added as she worked on the last of his deplorable shirts. ‘There.’ She shook it out, looked at it critically, then folded it up. ‘You now have five shirts that are halfway decent. I’ll just put them back and then I will see what I can do with your uniform now it is dry.’
Ross found himself staring at the undeniably attractive sight of her rounded backside as she bent over the open trunk and shifted his gaze to the deck over his head. The lust he had felt when he had woken that morning to find her in his arms had not lessened and he was not going to add fuel to its flames by ogling Meg’s figure. It had been hard enough getting to sleep last night, with her warm in the bed next to him: tonight would be worse, now he knew how good she felt against him.
‘Oh! You have books!’ She was on her knees, staring into the bottom of the trunk. ‘Lots of them.’
‘Take one if you want to read.’ Someone might as well enjoy them.
‘May I?’ She was lifting them out before he could reply. ‘Gulliver’s Travels—I have always wanted to read that. Would you like one?’
‘No.’ Reading military tactics would be rubbing salt in the wound, the thought of classical texts made his head ache and poetry and fiction held not the slightest charm. He had carted those books with care the length and breadth of the Iberian Peninsula, had read them with passion whenever he could, and now he found he had not the slightest desire to see them ever again. The urge to discover all the literature he had spurned as a youth had suddenly left him. ‘Thank you,’ he added, aware that he was probably sounding like a lout and not really caring much about that either.
‘I’ll read to you.’ Meg opened the book carefully on her knees.
‘I want to sleep.’
‘You cannot possibly be tired and if you sleep now you will not rest well tonight.’ She sounded remarkably like his old nanny when he was five. Ross rolled his eyes and settled back, resigned to his fate.
‘Travels into several remote nations of the world in four parts by Lemuel Gulliver, first a surgeon, then a captain of several ships. Part the first, a voyage to Lilliput,’ Meg read. ‘My father had a small estate in Nottinghamshire; I was the third of five sons…’ Her tone deepened as she realised she was reading a first-person account by a man, and Ross closed his eyes, caught immediately by the fluency of her clear voice. Perhaps, after all, he would not sleep.
‘…and lie at my full length in the temple.’ Meg closed the book and sighed, revelling in the luxury of a book and the time to read it in. ‘Oh! Have I put you to sleep after all?’
‘No.’ Ross opened his eyes. ‘No, I was quite lost in the story you were recounting—you have the knack of reading aloud very vividly.’
‘Thank you.’ He almost smiled. Meg closed the book and set it aside, careful not to stare at Ross directly, as though the fleeting look of pleasure on his face was a wild animal she might scare away by confronting it. ‘I am agog to know what happens next, but that is the end of the chapter and time, I think, for dinner. I’ll send Johnny down with yours.’
It was more difficult to move about now the ship was well out into the bay and receiving the full strength of the swell. Meg found herself putting out both hands to fend off from each side of the passageway in turn and smiled to find herself staggering about like a drunk.
When she reached the stairs—companionway, she remembered to call it—she took a firm grip of the rail and then slipped as her foot skidded on the worn wood. Immediately a hand cupped her elbow and steadied her.
‘Ma’am. Have a care.’ There were two gentlemen standing behind her; one had reached to steady her.
‘Thank you, sir. I have not yet got my sea legs, I fear.’ He kept hold of her arm as they climbed and Meg glanced up at him, recognising his face. He and his companion were merchants, she had decided when she had seen them at breakfast. They certainly did not appear to have wives or families with them. Both men were well dressed, in their thirties, perhaps.