Carola Dunn (15 page)

 Gathering the weeds, piled on an old sack, from the ground beside her, she rose to her feet. Involutarily she surveyed the lane, staring after the recent passer-by. He was gone.

 Lyuba bounced up to her and launched herself into the air. Laughing, Mariana fended off the puppy’s attempt to kiss her nose.

 “Down, girl!”

 Setting off around the cottage with the bundle of weeds, Mariana glanced back to see Lyuba sniffing at the newly turned earth. She called the pup to her. Lyuba picked something up and came trotting to lay it at her mistress’s feet.

 “My trowel! I had forgot it. Good dog.”

 With a big, toothy grin, Lyuba followed her to the compost heap and watched with great interest as she dumped the weeds on top.

 “I shall just wash, and then we will go for a walk in the woods.” Was talking to the dog a sign of incipient madness? Mariana wondered.

 Lyuba did not think so. Ears pricked, she caught the only important word and gave a happy yip.

 Mariana headed for the cottage. Her new home was a small, two-story dwelling, built of rosy brick with a tile roof. While the garden had been neglected of late years—the lawyer had told her the previous tenant, Mr Foster, had departed to live with his daughter at the age of eighty-three—the house had been put in order before it was advertised for rent. The doors and window-frames gleamed with new primrose-yellow paint.

 Though it did not belong to her, Mariana felt a proprietorial pride in her cottage. For the first time in many years, she had a place to call home.

 When she stopped on the back step to scrape her boots, Lyuba caught up with her—and proudly laid a large dandelion, root and all, at her feet.

 “Oh dear!” Mariana shook her head with a rueful smile. “I am going to have to teach you what to retrieve and what to leave be! Wait out here a minute, now. I shall be back in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.”

 Madness? No, loneliness, she acknowledged. Perhaps it had been a mistake to settle in the country. Yet, country born and bred, it was for the English countryside she had yearned during those long years of exile.

 She had forgotten the clannishness of rural folk, their slowness to accept outsiders. Somehow she must worm her way into the closed society.

 Being seen in her present state was not the best way to go about it, she thought wryly, but she did so enjoy gardening. After the punctilious observance of every nuance of propriety for so many years, she refused to let herself be hemmed in still by other people’s pettifogging notions of decorum.

 In the little mirror nailed above the kitchen sink, she regarded the streak of mud across her brow which had so shocked the recent passer-by. She frowned. Assuming he was not just passing through but lived in or near Wycherlea, she wanted to know: Who was the disdainful soldier?

Chapter 2

 Who was the slattern working in the garden of Merriman’s Cottage? wondered Lieutenant-Colonel Damian Perrincourt as he rode slowly on. Had the long, painful struggle against Napoleon consumed so many men that their womenfolk must now be hired as outdoor servants?

 She had looked at him boldly, with what might have been the beginnings of a friendly smile. Something in his face had wiped the smile from her expressive mouth.

 Just as well. Her figure was good, enticing even, despite the grey streaks Damian had noted in the dark, untidy hair exposed by her indecorous lack of a head-covering. He had to admit to himself he actually felt a twinge of desire, and it simply would not do.

 Quite apart from the aversion to fouling his own nest instilled in him by his father, he was in no physical shape for passion. Fortunately, the sight of a smear of mud on her forehead had dissipated the meagre trace of desire in his loins. No gentleman could possibly be attracted to so ramshackle a female.

 He had been too far from her to see the colour of her eyes, he thought irrelevantly.

 His mother might know who was renting Merriman’s Cottage now, and whom the tenant had taken on as gardener. Mrs Perrincourt had always taken a great interest in the welfare of dependents and villagers. Last time Damian came home on leave, she had bemoaned the increasing frailty which curtailed her visits to the poor.

 A fine pair they would make, he and Mama, a couple of semi-invalids doing their best to run the estate and to bring up Jack’s children.

 At the thought of his much loved younger brother’s demise, a pang of sorrow shot through Damian’s breast. Jack was four months dead, but the immediacy of his grief had had no chance to soften. His mother’s letter had followed him to Spain and back, to catch up with him just a few days since, when he left the military hospital and found the news awaiting him at regimental headquarters.

 He would have had to sell out then, of course, even if the wound to his back had not put paid to his military career. After two decades in uniform, twenty years with an ever advancing rank before his name, as soon as the necessary papers found their way through the proper channels, he would be plain Damian Perrincourt, Esquire.

* * * *

 With heels and reins, he turned Saladin’s head towards the gates of Wych Court. The slight motion, like the puff of bellows on smouldering embers, reignited the fire in his back. He braced himself, suppressing a groan. No more than a lieutenant-colonel in Wellington’s army could the master of Wych Court allow himself to appear a weakling.

 He dared not allow himself to slump in the saddle. To bend his backbone was to invite agony. Tired as he was, he sat straight as a ramrod as he rode up the carriage drive.

 “Uncle Damian! Uncle Damian!”

 A small, fair-haired boy, liberally bespattered with mud, dashed out from behind one of the great oaks lining the avenue. One dirt-caked hand waved a vigorous greeting. With the other, he hauled his still smaller, equally grubby sister behind him. The little girl had a tiny kitten, remarkably white, draped on her shoulder.

 “Halt!” Damian barked, as the heedless children scampered towards him.

 Saladin was too well-mannered to rear. The great black charger sidled, sending fresh spasms of pain radiating from the spot, horribly close to Damian’s spine, where the ricocheting bullet had lodged. Half an inch over, the doctors said, and he would have been dead or crippled for life.

 Sometimes death seemed desirable.

 “Don’t you know better than to run at a horse?” he demanded harshly.

 “But Papa said you are a famous horseman,” the boy argued, then added with deep suspicion, “I say, you are our uncle Damian, aren’t you?”

 At his last leave, three years ago, Thomas and Lucinda had been tots in the nursery. Uninterested in children, Damian had duly—and briefly—admired his brother’s offspring. Most of his time had been spent examining and gratefully admiring Jack’s excellent stewardship of the Wych Court estate since their father’s death.

 His niece and nephew must be five and seven years old now, or thereabouts. They were quite old enough, at any rate, to behave themselves with propriety, to have learnt a modicum of self-discipline.

 “Yes, I am your uncle, though I confess myself ashamed to admit so close a relationship to two such disgraceful ragamuffins. You are both filthy.”

 “It’s all right, we are wearing old clothes,” Thomas said cheerfully.

 Damian’s brows drew together in a frown. “What is your governess about to let you run wild like this?” he queried in an ominous tone.

 “Oh, we have no governess at present, Uncle. Miss Robinson had to leave to nurse her sick sister. Gran’mama and Nurse make us do our lessons, but anyway, we both like reading, don’t we, Lucy?”

 “Yeth.” Lucinda nodded, her beaming smile revealing the absence of two front teeth from the lower set. “Can I ride on your horth, Uncle Damian? He’th pretty. Here, Tommy, hold Pirate for me.”

 She handed the kitten—a black patch over one eye explaining the name—to her brother and held up her arms, in obvious expectation of being swept into the saddle before her uncle. Her innocent trustfulness touched his heart, but the very notion of bending to lift her was painful.

 He must not admit his debility.

 “Certainly not!” he snapped. “You cannot suppose I wish to arrive home with mud all over my uniform.”

 “Why not? Gran’mama says you are not going to be in the army any more,” said Thomas, with interest, not impertinence, as far as Damian could tell.

 “Because the only excuse for a uniform not to be immaculate is exposure to battle,” he said coldly. “Nor ought a gentleman ever to be seen in soiled clothing.”

 “But—” said Lucinda.

 “Nor a lady,” Damian crushed her. “Pray excuse me now. I am eager to reach the house.”

 As he set Saladin to a fast walk, less jarring than a trot, he heard the child’s plaintive voice behind him.

 “I wath jutht going to tell him Papa uthed to get dirty quite often, out in the fieldth. Papa wath a gentleman. I wish Papa and Mama didn’t die.”

 Guilt pricked him. He had not considered their loss, only his own. Of course they must miss their parents, but all the more reason why they should be sitting clean and quiet in the schoolroom conning their lessons, not haring about the park like wretched guttersnipes.

 Apparently his mother was too feeble now to control her grandchildren, or to find someone to control them. He would have to take them in hand himself, until a new governess, a strict disciplinarian, could be procured.

 The avenue opened out into a wide carriage sweep before the house. As always, his heart leapt at the sight of the rosy brick and dark brown timbers of the Elizabethan manor. As squires of Wych Court, the Perrincourts stretched back in an unbroken line to the sixteenth century. Damian was merely the latest in the long succession.

 He would soon have the place as smoothly running as he had left his regiment in Spain; and the doctors had promised the pain in his back would lessen, if never quite disappear.

 In spite of everything, it was good to be home.

* * * *

 A groom was on the lookout for the master, and came running to take his reins. Damian waved him away.

 “I shall ride around to the stables,” he growled.

 He was afraid his mother might be watching from the windows. He did not want her to observe the dreaded, torturous, and sometimes humiliating process of dismounting.

 It was bad enough that the stablehands must witness his disability. There was no way to avoid that.

 A brief trial of riding in a carriage had convinced him that the enforced immobility was even worse than the strain of riding on horseback. His coachman and his batman had had to lift him out, and it had been half an hour before he was capable of taking a step without their support.

 Mounting Saladin—with their help—he had left them to follow with his baggage. Thank heaven Wycherlea was not far from London.

 The groom raced ahead of him, round the corner of the house. When Damian reached the stable yard, all the grooms and stableboys were lined up to greet him, cap in hand. His gaze swiftly scanned their rank, noting tarnished buttons here and a couple missing there, mucky boots without laces, sagging pockets, a torn sleeve, a lad with hay in his hair and another actually chewing on a straw.

 This was not the army, Damian reminded himself. But by the same token, these men had not the excuse of battle or even weary marches to mitigate their appalling untidiness. Order must be restored.

 Tomorrow, he decided wearily.

 Old Benson, the head groom, stepped forward with his snaggle-toothed, tobacco-stained grin. “Welcome home, sir!” he exclaimed.

 “Huzzah for the Squire!” cried one of the fellows, and caps flew into the air as the old walls resounded with their enthusiastic cheers.

 Damian could not help but smile in response. He felt himself relaxing, and quickly stiffened. Aware that his smile at once became strained, unnatural, he stopped smiling.

 He ought to let the head groom present each man to him, but at present the effort required was too great.

 “Thank you,” he said. “I am glad to be home. Benson, I should like a word with you. The rest of you may go about your duties.”

 While the others scattered, a trifle bewildered by this abrupt dismissal after their spirited welcome, Benson came to Saladin’s head and took the reins. Nearly forty years ago, Benson had set Damian on his first pony. Having so often been picked up and dusted off, he did not mind now accepting the old man’s assistance to dismount.

 “You need not hold him,” he said gruffly. “He will stand still. I need a hand down.”

 Despite his gnarled appearance, the head groom was still a powerful man, as Damian soon gratefully discovered. He dismounted gingerly, with the greatest care. Nonetheless, so violent was the pain that darkness closed in on his vision, his ears rang, and his knees started to buckle.

 Benson propped him up. He clung to the saddle, leaning his forehead against the great, black, motionless gelding who had not long since borne his unconscious body from certain death on the battlefield.

 The groom’s anxious voice seemed to come from far off. “Ye’re hurt, Master Damian!”

 “Healing,” he gasped. “Just a little dizzy. I shall be all right...in a minute.”

 Even as he spoke, he did not believe his own words, but it was true. The darkness passed. The strength returned to his legs. Straightening cautiously, he took a step away from his horse.

 “Ye’ll do, sir?”

 “I’ll do. Take good care of Saladin.” He started to give minute instructions for the care of the charger.

 Benson shook his head reproachfully. “Don’t I know how to look after cattle, sir? I’ll see to him meself, and he’ll have everything o’ the best, never fear. One of the men’ll go with you indoors.”

 “No!” Damian snapped. Immediately regretting his curtness to the faithful old servant, he went on in a more conciliatory tone. “That is not necessary. Send my batman to me when the carriage arrives. It will be here soon. I rode at an easy pace.”

 “Aye, sir. We’m all right glad you’re back, sir. We’ve been sorely missing Master Jack.”

 Damian acknowledged his awkward sympathy with a sober nod. Attempting a compromise between the firm stride required by his dignity and the delicate tread required by his back, he went into the house.