Miranda Jarrett - The Silver Lord

George followed, keeping his little smile to himself. He’d won this particular skirmish handily, and he suspected there’d be more to come before they were done. Clearly Miss Winslow hated losing just as much as he did—which was making this tour a great deal more interesting than the old-fashioned furniture and creaking steps.

Their truce lasted through the tour of the dining room, the drawing room, and another dark little parlor pretending to be a library, though the shelves appeared to hold not books, but a mouldering collection of badly preserved stuffed gamebirds. The same uneasy peace held between them as they went downstairs and through the empty servants’ hall, past the laundry and the dairy and the echoing catacombs of the pantry, scullery, and kitchen, where George decided there was nothing more desultory than a kitchen bereft of the bullying chatter of a cook and the savory fragrances of roasting and baking, or sadder to see than a cold, clean-swept hearth with a row of empty spits above it.

How in blazes did Miss Winslow live in the middle of this? Surely she couldn’t be spending night and day alone among these shrouded chairs and mouldering walls, not and keep that straight defiance in her back and the sharp spark in her eyes. Surely there must be some other small, snug cottage on the land where she and her old father lived, some other place that was home.

But if that were so, then why did she still have so much pride in the old hall, shabby as it was? And why, when he had the power to restore it, did she seem so resentful of such a possibility? Why was she so intent on chasing him away?

And why, really, did he care?

“This is the mistress’s bedchamber,” she was saying as she threw open the shutters of the next-to-last room upstairs. “It has not been used in a long time, Mr. Trelawney being a bachelor-gentleman.”

“But doubtless at least one visiting queen or another has slept here,” said George, gazing at the enormous canopy bed, the heavily carved posts and the faded white and gold brocade hangings still maintaining a rare, regal grandeur. “Isn’t that always the case with the grand beds in these old houses?”

“No,” she said quickly. “Not here, not at Feversham. No lady’s ever slept in that bed that hadn’t a wedded right to it.”

Unable to resist such an opening, he patted the bed’s faded coverlet. “You’ve not been tempted to try it yourself, Miss Winslow? Not once, for a lark, to see how the mistress slumbered?”

Fiercely she shook her head, even as she blushed. Ah, he thought, so she had tried the bed, no matter how severe and proper she aspired to be. What woman wouldn’t, really, when tempted with a bedstead fit for a queen?

Or fit for a smoke-eyed woman with a queen’s own bearing….

“You have not asked of the roof, My Lord,” she said hurriedly, wishing so clearly to move from the topic of the bed that he almost—almost—regretted twitting her about it. “Most of you Londoners ask after that.”

He glanced up towards the ceiling, where the white plaster was stained yellow from obvious water damage. “I assume that there is one?”

“Of course,” she said. “It is made of tiles, to replace the old thatch.”

“And does it leak, Miss Winslow, this tiled roof?”

She looked upward, too, following his gaze. “Rain is a part of our life here, Captain My Lord. Raindrops and sea-spray—why, we scarce notice them, nor the marks that they leave.”

He smiled, knowing inevitably what would come next. “But the Londoners notice?”

“Oh, yes,” she said with undeniable triumph in her voice, and for the first time she smiled in return, quick and determined, in a way that seemed to link them together for that instant. “They do. Here is the last room for you to see, My Lord, the master’s chamber. You shall understand for yourself why it is the most perfect room in the entire house.”

His own smile lingered as he followed her, thinking of how that grin of hers was already as close to perfection as anything he’d see today. He’d tolerate a good winter’s worth of water-marked plaster to be able to see her look at him like that again.

But as soon as she pulled back the heavy velvet curtains, he forgot everything else but the view that rolled away before him. Here the old-fashioned diamond panes had been replaced with newer casements, freeing the landscape. The overgrown remnants of a garden huddled close to the house, then a band of wind-stunted oaks and evergreens that ran to a ragged edge of sandy land, and then—then lay the restless, shimmering silver of the sea, the horizon softened on a gray day like this so the waves and sky blended into one. What he would see from these windows would never be the same twice, just like the sea itself, and just like the sea, he’d always be drawn irresistibly back to it.

“Mark what I say, Captain My Lord,” said Miss Winslow swiftly, realizing too late the cost of sharing perfection. “There is so much wrong with Feversham that you cannot see for yourself, not in so short a time! Every chimney needs repointing, and every fireplace smokes. I cannot count the panes missing from the windows, the lead in the mullions having gone so brittle. The last cook left over how the bake-ovens are crumbling to dust from the inside, and there’s so many bats living in the attic that they’d come down into the servants’ quarters, too, making the maidservants all give notice from fright.”

He was only half listening, because none of it mattered. He would make whatever was wrong into right, wouldn’t he? There’d be no better way to spend his Spanish silver than this. He would have the curtains taken down from these windows, and he would never replace them. He would want to wake to this, his own private square of sea, and he would want to fall asleep to it each night as well.

“Shall I call your carriage, Captain My Lord?” the gray-eyed woman beside him was asking. “You should begin your journey now, before it grows later. Your driver will not wish to take his horses on our roads after dark.”

“Thank you, Miss Winslow,” he said gently. He could hardly fault her if she wished to keep such a magical place as this to herself, could he? But if he hadn’t come, then someone else would, and at least he would be sure to give her and her worthless old father a handsome parting settlement when he let them go. “Tell the driver I shall be ready in half an hour’s time.”

“You will leave, then, Captain My Lord?” she asked, the relief in her eyes strangely sad. “You will be gone from Feversham?”

He nodded, wishing for her sake that the truth didn’t feel like deceit. He would leave, but he meant to return, and then he wouldn’t leave again until he’d new orders from his admiral. He would always come back to Feversham because, like every wandering sailor, at last he’d found his home. He’d prepared for the worst, and been granted better than he’d ever dreamed.

He’d found perfection.

Fan stood on the bench and gazed out over the score of expectant faces turned up towards her, her hands clasped before her to hide any trembling. The candlelight from the lanterns flickered with the drafts that found their way in through the barn’s timbers, and the men of the Company were waiting so quietly that she could hear the horses at their hay, rustling and nickering in their stalls behind her.

“I know there’s talk at the tavern in town,” she began, “and I’m not the kind to pretend otherwise. The hard truth is this—that a Londoner came to look at Feversham with an eye towards buying it.”

She let the muttered oaths and exclamations settle before she continued. “But this fine gentleman found the house old and inconvenient, with much lacking,” she said, adding a bit of purposeful scorn to her voice for extra emphasis, “and I do not expect him to bother with us again.”