Jo Leigh - Confessions Bundle

Why charming, and more importantly, why to her? What had been the meaning of that supercilious little smile, and that look in his watery eyes? The only answers that came to her struck her as a form of insult, and she had been loath to encounter him ever since.

When he was safely gone, Grace stepped out of her hiding place, quickening her pace.

Once she left the village, the wind picked up even more. The stone hedgerows provided some protection, and the trees would have done more, if they had been in full leaf. However, they were not and Grace realized the wind had veered from the east to the north. She glanced anxiously at the sky. As if she didn’t have enough to trouble her, the billowing clouds had grown darker and thicker, and it looked about to rain.

Her old cloak provided scant protection. If she didn’t hurry, she would be not merely cold, but wet through before she could get home.

Thinking it was a good thing the Hurleys couldn’t see her, Grace lifted her skirts, got a good grip on her basket, and disregarded any notion that it was unladylike to run.

The handsome young man cursed and gingerly felt the gash on his forehead. When he looked at his fingers, squinting not just because the sky had grown darker, but also because he was having difficulty focusing, he saw blood. Not a lot, though, and he supposed it could have been worse. “I could’a been sober,” he mumbled with a wry smile.

His bleary gaze traveled to the offending limb of the oak that loomed over the road. “Where did you come from, eh?” he demanded, only half in jest, because the branch had truly seemed to come from nowhere. He hadn’t noticed that he had entered a small wood, or that the road took a sudden dip there.

“Maybe this is an enchanted forest,” he continued, his enunciation less than precise. “Ogres and trolls

and Boffins, I shouldn’t wonder. No beautiful princesses to help out a poor traveler, though.”

His smile disappeared, to be replaced with a bitter frown as he looked around for his horse. Or rather, the nag he had “borrowed” from some unsuspecting innkeeper. “I suppose Adrian would say that if I wasn’t drunk,” he muttered bitterly, “I would have seen the damn thing, and if I hadn’t cheated, Boffin wouldn’t be after me. And he’d be right. Again. Damn him to hell.”

Forcing all thoughts of his half brother from his mind, he contemplated using his last handkerchief for a bandage, then decided against it. The cut was minor; no need to ruin a perfectly good handkerchief, even if it did need a washing. Instead, he picked up his battered hat and placed it lightly upon his head. Then, having located the nag placidly munching grass at the side of the rutted road beside the mossy stone fence, he reached into his worn saddlebag and withdrew a bottle, which he tilted and put to his lips.

He lowered it after a moment. “Hardly enough to taste,” he mumbled, tossing the bottle over the hedgerow. He scratched, wondering if he had picked up something more than a bottle of hock at the tavern. Gad, he needed a bath and new clothes. These garments had withstood the voyage from Lower Canada, but they couldn’t take much more wear.

If any of his friends from London should see him, they would think he had indeed suffered these past five years. Adrian would say it was no more than he deserved

but he wasn’t going to think about Adrian.

Then he looked back the way he had come. No. Nobody there. Thank God. He didn’t have the strength of a baby at the moment.

The man shook his head. “Doesn’t do to think about that,” he murmured, staggering back toward the horse. “I couldn’t have done anything else.”

Then, with a soft curse, he clambered onto his mount. “How the mighty have fallen, eh, my Pegasus?” he said to the horse. “Let us away!”

The beast lurched into motion and started down the road, eventually coming out of the woods to what appeared to be the junction of this road and a farmer’s lane. The man strained to see any kind of a sign, but either his eyes were going, or the light was fading, or he was just too drunk, because he couldn’t find one. Not so much as a white cross.

Just where the devil was he? Why couldn’t the local inhabitants have signposts, like other civilized people? He should have disembarked at Liverpool, or Dover, not Yarmouth.

He knew he must be somewhere to the southwest of Boston, still close enough to the fens to catch a marshy whiff of the breeze blowing over the plowed fields too often for his comfort. The land was getting less flat, though, and every now and then, he spied a sheep.

Lincolnshire was terrible country, he thought grumpily, and the roads were the most terrible thing about it. Once he got out of here, he’d never come back. If he got out of here. If he didn’t keep going around in circles, and if Boffin and his gang didn’t find him…

Surely there must be an inn somewhere in this godforsaken countryside, where he could play a few card games and earn enough for a meal.

He pulled his soiled jacket tighter. The weather was damnably cold for England in April, but not nearly as cold as some of the places he had been since he had left the country. That was why he had come back, of course. The weather. Only the weather.

He still had no wish to see his family. Not his mother, who had betrayed him. Or his half brother, with his condescending self-righteousness. He could imagine the martyr’s face and hear his admonishing words.

And certainly not his half brother’s wife.

His mother would be glad to know he was alive, of course. His spoiled, indulgent, vain mother, who had given her son whatever he wanted, until he was as vain and spoiled as she.

No one had ever had to tell him such things; he had realized early in his school days what he was. It had never troubled him, and as for Adrian, he was jealous. Not just because of the mother who had come into his house to replace his own, but because their father had loved his second son, too. Which was only right.

He didn’t need or want to see Adrian or anybody else in his family. To live in anticipation of the condemnation sure to come his way. To see the disrespect in his sibling’s eyes. To hear his mother sing his praises, and know that she did so only because he was her son, not for any merit she believed he possessed.

Suddenly, the nag stumbled on the mud-slick road. It quickly regained its footing, but not before the young man slipped from the saddle. He lay on his stomach, then tried to stand, too drunk to make much of a success of it. “I’ll just rest a moment,” he mumbled, lying down and laying his head on his arms.

In another moment, Lord Elliot Fitzwalter, second son of the fifth Duke of Barroughby, was fast asleep in a Lincolnshire ditch.

The indomitable old woman sat staring out the window, her back straight and her gaze fastened on the long, sweeping drive that led to Barroughby Hall before continuing to her habitation.

The Dower House stood on a low rise, and at one time, before the present dowager duchess’s occupation, it had been screened from Barroughby Hall by a row of larch trees. The dowager duchess had ordered them cut down, the better to see over the large lawn past the ornate gardens to the drive and the front entrance of the hall.

As she looked out, she paid no heed to the young couple who had quietly entered the tastefully furnished drawing room. The man was dark haired, tall, handsome and serious; his wife was not a great beauty, but there was a calm serenity to her features that the duke considered far more lovely.

The Duke of Barroughby glanced at his wife, and then addressed his stepmother. “Good afternoon, Your Grace.”

The dowager duchess did not turn to look at her visitors. She knew who they were; they came to the Dower House every day when they were in residence at the ducal seat. “Have you heard from him?” she demanded, as she did every time they called.