Miranda Jarrett - The Silver Lord

He didn’t hunt and he didn’t give grand entertainments that lasted for weeks, the two usual reasons for country living. He didn’t feel the imperative to have a home tagged onto his name, of always being referred to as “Lord George Claremont of Pretentious Hall.” Besides, he’d no intention of lingering on land any longer than he had to, and as for the family that required the suitable arranging that the advertisement had promised—he certainly didn’t have so much as a wife, nor, given his career, was he ever likely to acquire one.

Yet for the first time in his life he had the means to support the title he’d been born to. He hadn’t inherited the dukedom or their father’s debts with it, thank God, the way his older brother Brant had, but he was still a Claremont, and there were certain obligations to the family that should—and now could—be maintained. He was an officer of the king, too. He couldn’t spend the rest of his life ashore living in the same ragtag lodgings over a tavern in Portsmouth.

The carriage slowed to turn off the main road, and with new interest George studied the landscape. There was a wildness to this part of Kent that he’d always liked, so different from the plump, sunny contentedness of his native Sussex. It had the additional advantages of being far enough from Portsmouth to excuse him from calling on admirals’ wives, yet almost exactly equidistant between Claremont Hall, where Brant lived, and Chowringhee, the oddly named house that his younger brother Revell had built for his new wife Sara.

On this overcast day, the flat gray of the sky seemed to merge with the silvery sweep of the Romney Marshes, a place that fell somewhere between land and the restless waters of the Channel. This coast was known to have an unhappy history, replete with shipwrecks and smuggling, and it looked it. The few scattered trees had been bent and gnarled by the wind, and as far as the horizon stretched George could see no friendly curls of smoke to mark a cottage chimney. He’d not be troubled by inquisitive neighbors, that was certain. A desultory handful of gulls riding the wind and a herd of shaggy brown sheep, huddled along a stone wall for shelter as they grazed at the stubbled grass, were the only living things in the entire bleak picture.

The driver turned again and swore as he struggled to control the weary horses. The new road was narrower and even more rutted, and George braced himself to keep from being bounced from his seat to the floor. One more way to hold unwanted visitors at bay, he thought wryly, and craned his neck for his first glimpse of the house that surely must be near.

And once again, he’d been wise to expect the worst.

Clearly the London artist who’d been called upon to draw the house had never seen it for himself, but had made his illustration based on another’s description. Like the blind men and the elephant in the old fable, the stark results were based far more on imagination than reality. The ancient timbers and the white plaster and the diamond-paned windows were there, true, but there was no sign of the gracious old oaks or the rosebushes, and the drive was neither curving nor welcoming, but scarcely more than another rutted path to the door.

“Here we be, M’Lord Cap’n,” said the driver as he opened the carriage door for George. His face was ruddy from the cold, his breath coming in white puffs, as he kept a suspicious eye on the scruffy boy who’d appeared to hold the horses. “Feversham Hall, M’Lord Cap’n.”

George nodded, too intent on studying the house itself to venture more. The old timbers were splitting and silvered, the plaster needed patching, last summer’s weeds still dangled from the eaves, and nothing seemed to be parallel to anything else. Even that wretched boy with the horses would have to be taught to comb his hair and stand properly. If he took the house, he’d have plenty of work ahead to make it shipshape and Bristol-fashion. He’d have to bring in his own people up from the Nimble to see that things were done right, beginning with filling in the ditches in that hideous excuse for a road.

He nodded again, allowing himself a wry smile of determined anticipation with it. A right challenge this would be, wouldn’t it? If Addington and his blasted treaty had put the French out of his reach, at least for now, why not direct his energies and those of his idle crewmen towards replacing rotting timbers and split shingles? Perhaps “attack” had been the right word after all.

Purposefully he climbed the stone steps to thump his knuckles on the front door. The agent in London was supposed to have sent word about George’s arrival to the caretaker who lived in the house—a caretaker who was not only negligent in his duties, but dawdled at answering the door, decided George impatiently as he counted off the seconds he waited. If he took the house, one of his first tasks would be to send this worthless fellow packing.

George knocked again, harder. Where in blazes was the rascal, anyway?

He heard a scurry of footsteps inside, the clank and scrape of the lock being unbolted, and at last the heavy old door swung open on groaning iron hinges that needed as much attention as everything else. That much George had expected.

But he’d never anticipated the woman now standing before him.

She was tall, nearly as tall as George was himself, and even the simply cut dark gown that she wore with the white kerchief around her throat couldn’t hide that she was a handsomely made woman, one that would draw his eye anywhere. Just enough thick, dark hair showed beneath her cap to emphasise the whiteness of her skin, and her mouth had the kind of rich fullness that lonely sailors dream of. She seemed as if she’d been fashioned with the same contradictions as the landscape around her, dramatic and unyielding, beautiful yet severe, with thick-lashed eyes the mysterious smokey-gray of the mist that rose from Romney Marsh.

Yet though she wasn’t some giddy maidservant ripe for dalliance—she was too self-possessed for that—she wasn’t a lady, either, not answering her own door. The housekeeper, then, to stand with such authority. She was most definitely a different kind of beauty from the dithering, highborn London ladies he’d spend the last fortnight with, women so overbred and insubstantial in their white muslin gowns that a good west wind would have blown them away. But not this one, not at all, and George caught himself studying her with considerably more interest than he should.

“Good day, sir,” she said. The clipped words sounded more like a warning than a greeting, nor did she step to one side to invite him to enter. “We have been expecting you, Captain Claremont.”

“Captain Lord Claremont,” he corrected, his smile intended not to soften his words, but to show he meant them. “If you have been expecting my arrival, then you should know how to address me properly. ‘Good day, Captain My Lord’, not ‘sir.”’

Her eyes might have narrowed—he couldn’t be certain from the way the shadows fell across her face—but she most definitely did not smile.

“As you wish,” she said, pointedly omitting any title at all as she finally stepped aside and held back the door.

He walked past her, tucking his hat beneath his arm. As his eyes adjusted from the gray light outside, he could see that the interior of the house was in much the same state as the outside. Everything was well-ordered, scrubbed and swept, clean and in its place, but the cushions on the chairs were threadbare and the walls needed paint, the sorts of shabbiness that came from a lack of money, not inclination.

“Mr. Winslow is to show me the house,” he said as he ran his hand lightly along the carved oak leaves on the newel post. “Please summon him directly.”