Miranda Jarrett - The Silver Lord

“Beg pardon, Cap’n My Lord,” said Leggett, purposefully ignoring George’s broad hint. “There be one thing the lads wanted me to say.”

George sighed, twisting in his chair to face the other man. “Is it your quarters? The food?”

“Nay, nay, Cap’n M’Lord, they all be more than fine,” said Leggett hastily. “Fancy beds like them for the likes o’ us, eh?”

“Then what the devil ails you, man?”

Leggett gave another contemplative puff to his cheeks. “It be the lady, the one what we saw in the village. She be the same one what lives here, don’t she?”

“Miss Winslow has been the housekeeper here at Feversham for some years, yes,” said George, weariness sliding into testiness. “Not that she’s any concern of yours.”

“But she do be our concern, Cap’n M’Lord,” said Leggett doggedly. “Everywhere’s we look about this house, her mark be there. Womenfolk don’t like having their ways changed, and if she be staying here with us, why—”

“I will address that question when and if that happens,” said George curtly. “Until then Miss Winslow’s likes and dislikes will have no bearing on my orders, or your duty. Do I make myself clear, Leggett?”

“Aye, aye, Cap’n M’Lord.” Leggett snapped to attention, the tray still awkwardly balanced in his hands before him as he backed through the doorway, yanking the door shut behind him.

Which was, for once, exactly the response that George had desired, and with a muttered oath he sank back into his armchair, swirling the barely-touched brandy in his glass.

How in blazes could he tell his men what Miss Winslow would do next when he hadn’t the faintest idea himself? For what must have been the thousandth—no, the millionth!—time he thought back to that strange, wonderful, dreadful conversation in the burying ground.

Matters had begun badly enough, with no letter from blasted Potipher to ease his way, and making the two of them spit and start at one another like cats there in the middle of the lane, for all the village world to gawk at. He’d tried to make it right with the earrings, and had had that humble piece of gallantry twisted around and tossed back at him. Without thinking, he’d next taken her arm: another mistake, touching her that way, and one she’d soon corrected by vehemently pulling free.

Then, finally, to punish him all the more, she’d dragged him off to stand in the sorrowful center of the burying ground. Wasn’t his news likely to be disagreeable enough to her without him having to deliver it surrounded by a sea of ancient graves?

And yet he could not forget how she’d looked when he’d first seen her again, calling to him there in the lane as he’d climbed down from his horse. Her hair had been uncharacteristically disheveled and her cheeks were flushed from the wind, her lips were parted from her haste, and those red gimcrack ear-bobs were swinging merrily from her ears. Perhaps it had been only a trick of the pale-gray sunlight washing over her face, but once freed of the house, she’d seemed younger, more at ease. She’d also, almost, seemed pleased to see him again.

Until, that is, he’d explained his reason for being there.

Even then the conversation hadn’t gone as he’d expected. She’d thought she had to leave, and he’d told her she could stay: fair enough, true enough. But somehow they’d begun speaking of their childhoods, the sort of funny, flirtatious, touching little conversation that he’d never had with any other woman, or man, for that matter.

In that short time, only a handful of sentences, really, he’d learned her name was Fan, not just the formal Miss Winslow. He’d learned she had spent far too much time among adults, just as he himself had been sent to sea and a man’s world when he’d still been a boy. He’d learned that she could snap that defensive wall back in place around herself in an instant, and he’d learned—once again—that he still could not speak of his father.

And he’d learned that no matter what clauses the Trelawneys had put into their contracts, he was the one who now wanted her to stay on at Feversham, just as she was the one who most decidedly didn’t. Not even Brant, with all his much-vaunted experience with women, would be able to make sense of this mess.

Glumly he stared into the glass in his hand. It was all the fault of this wretched, so-called peace with France. If he’d stayed at sea, where he belonged, where he knew what to do and what to say, then none of this would have happened. He would have remained a happy man, plagued only by storms and high seas and enemy gunfire instead of a ramshackle house and a beautiful gray-eyed housekeeper.

So thoroughly was he regretting his carefree past that he didn’t hear the first knock on the door to his bedchamber, or even the second. But the third—the third he heard.

“Come,” he barked without turning, certain it was Leggett. “It better damned well be important this time, you impudent old rascal.”

“It is important, Captain My Lord,” said Fan Winslow, “and I promise not to take more of your time than is necessary.”

Instantly George lurched to his feet, sprinkling brandy over his waistcoat and the floor.

“Fan,” he began without thinking. “That is, Miss Winslow. Yes. That is to say, ah, at this hour, ah, I believed you to be someone else.”

“I am only myself,” she said. “I’ve never pretended otherwise.”

“Where have you been?” Even George knew enough of women to see she’d been crying, her eyes puffy and red-rimmed. “No one has seen you for hours. I’ve been concerned, damned concerned.”

“Thank you, Captain My Lord,” she said, pointedly not answering his question about how she’d passed her afternoon. She held out a large ring of keys towards him. “I’ve come to return these to you as the new master.”

“Hold now, there’s no need for that,” he said, wincing inwardly at the heartiness in his voice. “You keep those for now.”

“Why?” she demanded, somehow still managing to put an edge in the single word even with her face and eyes soft from tears—tears that, he was quite sure, she’d never let slip and shed before him.

“For all the reasons I said before,” he said. “Because Feversham’s your home. Because you belong here. Because I’ll need your knowledge of the house while making improvements.”

“Because the Trelawneys’ solicitors told you you must.”

“Because I wish it this way.” He reached out and placed his hand over hers with the keys, gently pushing both back towards her. “Because it is right.”

She stared down at his hand over his. This time she didn’t pull away, and though she was silent, he could sense her warring with herself, fighting her own judgment.

“Because,” he said. “Damnation, Fan, because you belong here.”

She raised her gaze to meet his, letting him glimpse that same vulnerable, lonely girl he’d discovered earlier in the graveyard, the one that was so carefully hidden behind the guise of the stern, competent housekeeper. He felt her turn her fingers against his, not to grasp the ring of keys more firmly, but to find the comfort of his touch.

“Because you want me to stay?” she whispered, the depth of her daring bright in her eyes.

“Because I want you to stay,” he repeated, and to his confused surprise he realized he’d never wanted anything more in his life. No, that wasn’t exactly true. What he wanted more was to take her into his arms, to feel the roughness of her woolen gown and the softness of her skin and learn how her hair would come undone and spill over his arm as he turned her face up towards his to kiss her. That was what he wanted even more.

But though he was known as a brave man, with medals and gold braid on his coat to prove it, he wasn’t brave enough to kiss her that boldly, not now, not yet. Instead he raised her hand, the keys jingling together, and pressed his lips to the back of it, closing his eyes to savor the scent of her wrist there at the edge of her sleeve, to feel the strength and the gentleness of her neatly curled fingers.