Jo Goodman (24 page)

"You would hire me to manage Weybourne Park?"

"That's what I meant when I said Severn's father didn't know
all
of the estate's assets."

Mercedes pressed her lips together remembering how she had reacted to that statement.

"You'd be in charge of the daily operations," he said. "I would have final approval on the larger expenditures, of course, but in most things I imagine I'll defer to your judgment. During the six weeks that I'm here, I'll expect you to teach me about the estate. Your main task will be to make certain I understand what crops are raised, how the tenants are dealt with, what taxes I must pay, and all the rest. Together we'll establish a list of items due attention and decide which will receive priority."

Mercedes thought surely he could hear her heart slam. The roar in her ears made it difficult to hear. He was not forcing her out of Weybourne Park, and he was not demanding her in his bed for the privilege of staying. He was offering the very thing she wanted.

"Well, Mercedes?"

She knew he was waiting for a reply. She could see the expectant look in his dark eyes even though the edges of her vision were blurred now. She saw his mouth moving but his voice was muffled by the rush of blood to her head. To give him her most heartfelt reply, Mercedes came to her feet.

And dropped like a stone.

Colin looked over at her slender body slumped across the divan. She had narrowly missed falling on the floor. He shook his head as he moved to lift her. "I hope I can take this as a yes."

Chapter 7

Mercedes came to consciousness while she was still in Colin's arms. There was little time to protest the arrangement or even to wonder if she enjoyed it. Moments after waking she was being lowered to her bed.

A veritable crowd hovered in the hallway. Mr. and Mrs. Hennepin were there. The twins. Two of the upstairs maids and the cook's helper. Chloe and Sylvia. She realized they must have trailed after Colin while he was carrying her. Colin, she noticed, was ignoring the on-lookers or oblivious to them. He didn't turn in their direction until Mercedes struggled to rise to a half-sitting position, supporting herself on her elbows.

Colin placed one hand on her shoulder and pushed her back. The gentle pressure he exerted was met with no resistance. He interpreted her small sigh as gratitude for not leaving the explanation to the gathering to her.

"Rest," he said. There was more command in the single word than tender admonition. Colin had been in charge of others too long for it to be otherwise. But he had also spent enough time with Mercedes to know she rarely responded as one of his crew. It was a true measure of her exhaustion, he thought, that she didn't argue with him.

The group in the hallway parted as he approached. Colin shut the door behind him as he stepped outside. "Miss Leyden will spend the day in her room," he said. "Mrs. Hennepin, if you would be so good as to see she has a light breakfast. Otherwise, all of you, let her be."

As an explanation it was lacking in content and there was an exchange of apprehensive glances. None of them moved.

Mutiny, even as tentatively staged as this one, was a new experience for Colin. He studied their faces, wondering at their motives. When it came to him, his dark eyes became even more coldly remote. "I didn't beat her," he said. Colin didn't wait to see if he was believed. He simply walked away.

* * *

Mercedes was horrified when the story was related to her, first by the twins, then by Mrs. Hennepin, and still later by Chloe with Sylvia offering breathless asides. Now that they knew she was truly all of a piece, they were embarrassed by the question they had never put to the captain. To a person they described Colin Thorne's anger as more terrible to look upon than anything they had ever experienced from the Earl of Weybourne.

Mercedes found she could not broach the subject with her new employer. It would have raised other questions that she was equally reluctant to answer. It was humiliating enough that he had seen the welt raised by her uncle's quirt. To discuss the extent of the abuse she had suffered at the earl's hands would have been difficult, but even more troubling for Mercedes was the fact that she had been unable to protect others from the same punishments. If that came to light, how could Colin Thorne judge her in any way less harshly than she judged herself? If he suspected she could be so weak-willed, ineffective, and powerless, would he still want her to manage Weybourne Park? To Mercedes's way of thinking there could be only one answer.

Mercedes's confinement to her bed accounted for only a fraction of her renewed energy over the next ten days. The real source of her vigor lay in her sense of purpose, and in smaller measure, her panic. She set herself the task of proving to Colin Thorne that she was firm and capable and strong and that his decision to set so much responsibility on her slender shoulders was not a misguided one.

Weybourne Park was eight hundred acres of prime agricultural land. At a distance the open fields appeared to be a patchwork quilt of organic productivity. It was upon closer inspection that the true state was revealed. Although the soil was rich for corn and wheat, sections had been allowed to go unseeded and bore no crop save for weeds. With too few tenants to manage the fields, the perimeters had been ravaged by birds and deer. Some of the stone cottages had been abandoned and others looked as if they should have been. As with the manor, there were roofs in need of repair and rotting timbers in the floor. While each family seemed to have enough vegetables, compliments of the carefully tended gardens at the rear of the cottages, Colin saw their stores of meat were low or nonexistent.

This observation puzzled him because there was much of Weybourne Park that was not given over to raising corn or wheat or sheep or cattle. In addition to the acres of farmland and pasture, there were deeply wooded areas where game was abundant. So abundant in fact, that it was destroying the crops.

The answer, he discovered, was that the earl had strictly forbidden hunting on his land. He did not deny himself or his friends that right, only his tenants. With pained honesty Mercedes told him that her uncle had made criminals of them all, forcing them to poach on the very land they tended, and placing her in the difficult position of covering for them.

Although Colin was certain Mercedes did not intend it, each day brought him some new revelation about the Earl of Weybourne. His crass disregard for his family's welfare and his selfish dedication to his own pleasures were at the root of the park's steady deterioration. That the decline had neither been swift nor complete was not the earl's fault. The single-minded pursuit of his personal satisfactions should have destroyed Weybourne Park years ago. It was the presence of Mercedes Leyden that had drawn out the denouement for more than a decade.

Colin had evidence of it again and again. Whether they were touring the fields or the pasture or the wood, he was given reason to be impressed by Mercedes's knowledge. She understood the demands of the land and what it required to make it productive.

The remaining tenants stood fast in their loyalty to her. The ones who had been forced to abandon their cottages had done so reluctantly and often because they had been threatened with eviction by the earl.

It was a similar story in the manor. Soon after Wallace Leyden had inherited the title and the estate, the servants came to the realization they could not expect the same treatment from this earl as they had received from his older brother. For those who had known both men as children it was more anticipated than not. There were some immediate defections. Those who had not worked at the manor long looked for positions elsewhere, sometimes even leaving their employment without a character to recommend them at another post. There were those who remained out of fear of not being able to find positions elsewhere, but most who stayed did so because they held a sense of duty to the late earl, his countess, and their daughter.

Mercedes may have come to this loyalty by default but it remained hers because she earned it. When her aunt died at the birth of the twins, Mercedes was sixteen. Responsibilities she had previously shared with Georgia were now hers to manage alone.

It wasn't from Mercedes that Colin learned these things, but from Mrs. Hennepin and others. While they toured the house and the grounds and made their lists of priorities and expenditures, Mercedes spoke little on any subject save Weybourne Park. She opened doors to him throughout the manor and was free with information about the use of the rooms, but allowed no entry into her own thoughts.

Colin learned there was a specific location for almost every imaginable task occupying the servants: lamp trimming, boot blacking, laundering, ironing, mending, polishing, and cooking. Like rabbits in a warren, the servants moved freely out of sight of the family as they went about their assignments in the nether regions of the house.

The family's movements were in the open but with no fewer choices. One could spend an afternoon in the gallery or the conservatory. There were two dining rooms, neither of which should be confused with the banquet hall, a library, a music room, and three distinct drawing rooms where one might entertain guests of different stations. On the upper floors, areas for dressing adjoined the bedchambers and reading rooms were available if one didn't want to go to the library. There was a school room for the twins and a nursery that had never been given over to any other use. Then there were the turrets, one sparely furnished and one not furnished at all.

Colin's polite refusal to spend much time there prompted Mercedes's beautiful smile. He was struck by what a rare thing it had become these last ten days. He had not been ignorant of the fact that she wanted to prove herself competent. He only wondered that she considered it necessary.

"Would you like to ride this afternoon?" she asked as they wended their way down from the turrets.

He was aware of her small considerations. Mercedes never kept him indoors all day long. She structured his education of Weybourne Park so there were activities that took them outside. An inventory of a half-dozen rooms would be followed by a walk to one of the streams that cut the southern portion of the property. Careless of staining her dress, Mercedes would sit on the grassy bank beside him while he fished. She felt no need to fill the silence with the sound of her own voice, but Colin often found himself asking questions just to listen to her. She had a pleasant, almost husky timbre that was as soothing as it was engaging. As a fishing companion she was most agreeable. It was also in her favor that she didn't mind baiting the hooks, a task that had never been to Colin's liking.

Fishing was not the only outdoor activity she made available to him. Explaining that he could learn about the state of the Park's financial problems just as simply on the portico, she had Mrs. Hennepin serve them tea there and they studied the ledgers in the bright sunshine while sharing cakes and pots of spiced orange tea.

Sometimes they were joined by others. The twins liked to ride, and they flew hell bent for leather over the rolling pastures in pursuit of Colin. Mercedes stayed back, arranging a picnic lunch on a shady knoll, and watched with dread and longing as the trio scattered clusters of sheep across the hillside. When they returned, Britton and Brendan would have healthy color in their cheeks and flash happy grins that Mercedes found deeply satisfying. That Colin found their company enjoyable filled her with unexpected pleasure.

Chloe and Sylvia could be counted on to escort Colin to the village. They could be as energetic in chasing down a new hair ribbon as their brothers were at dispersing sheep. Mercedes did not attend Colin on these shopping ventures, and though she was quite specific with the girls about not pressing him for favors, they invariably returned with some astonishingly fashionable adornment for their bonnets. Mercedes wished she could be more suspicious of his charity and less accepting of it.

She thought of that now as she walked along the narrow lane to the Thayers' cottage. Under her arm she carried a basket of fresh linens, ointments, and infant gowns for Mrs. Thayer's newborn. There was also a flask of brandy for Mr. Thayer. All of it was made available through Colin's generosity. The Thayers had been in immediate anticipation of the arrival of their fifth child when Mercedes had introduced them to the captain. On that occasion she had been struck by the ease with which he lowered Mrs. Thayer's guard by inquiring as to her health and showing an interest in her four other children. Mr. Thayer, laconic by nature, was almost verbose as Colin consulted him about the management of the dairy. Mercedes knew Colin could not have prompted those responses had his interest been anything less than sincere. Mr. Thayer had had plenty of dealings with the earl and was not one to be taken in easily.