Linda Needham (17 page)

C
harles had convinced himself that his treks down to the gatehouse sprang out of duty to his investigation. The fact that he did it every night after the main house was quiet, after Chip was tucked safely into bed, was merely a measure of his determination to catch Captain Spindleshanks in a dangerous moment of weakness: creeping up the drive to finally rescue his wife, scurrying from shadow to shadow, cloak and tricorn and long hair blowing in the night breezes.

But the deeper truth was utterly transparent to him: he was in danger of losing his heart to another man’s wife.

Hollie Finch MacGillnock.

Mrs. Captain Spindleshanks.

Hell and damnation.

There was something so unsettlingly right and natural in their evenings together and in their days, in the nimble way she debated him. He craved her slightest touch, admired her bullheadedness and her idealism, adored the way she nurtured his son as though the pair were flesh and blood.

And yet he couldn’t act upon this madness. It went against everything honorable that he’d schooled himself to become. He couldn’t relax his guard for a moment, else he’d find himself slipping his arms around her, because she fitted too naturally inside his embrace.

There was too much at stake to risk that kind of contact, and it had all begun to feel too much like a courting dance.

The thought that troubled him the most was that Adam MacGillnock had become a rival with the deck stacked inevitably in Charles’s favor. Once the man was indicted and tried—whether in person or
in absentia
—and his fate was decided by the judge and jury, Hollie Finch might be a free woman.

Would be free. And then what, if he was the agent of the man’s destruction?

There was something unsavory and unjust in the power that he held over MacGillnock. Which was the reason he had to step away from the man’s wife before it got that far.

And yet here he was, setting his trap, not wanting it sprung.

His heart rattling around inside his chest, he followed the gravel drive, trying not to hurry, trying not to think of the future.

But as he rounded the line of trees, he stopped. The gatehouse had far too many lights blazing tonight, and smoke dancing out of the chimney.

Feeling like a burglar, a bloody Peeping Tom, he took to the silence of the clipped lawn till he reached the front door beneath the portico. There his heart dropped into his stomach.

A man’s voice, muttering low tones, and then hers, thoroughly pleased and lilting. No clear words; only easy banter between a man and a woman.

Christ, this was it: the end of his illusion that Hollie was unattached and neglected. Hollie and her devoted husband, who’d left her hanging out to dry while he gallivanted all over the countryside, using his wife as cover.

Not that he was any better than MacGillnock—stooping to subterfuge and spying like a jilted swain. Angry to the marrow, prepared to survive the pain of catching the pair of them in a lovers’ embrace, Charles slipped through the door and into the hall, then went directly into the main room, his heart hardened to coal, prepared to tackle the coward as he leaped for the window.

He wasn’t at all prepared for Hollie standing
in the middle of her parlor, holding up a document of some sort and surrounded by a half-dozen of his staff.

They were staring at him, their startled faces flushed with guilt and horror.

Hollie’s glare was just as sternly condemning. “Can I help you, my lord?”

He opened his mouth, but the only thing that came out was an accusing, “What the devil is going on here?”

“I’m explaining the Magna Carta.”

To his staff?

“I was just reading to them that ‘No man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed—’”

“Miss Finch.”

Hollie had recognized the man’s voice and his outsized mood even before she’d turned toward the doorway. His face was as thunderous as she expected; she probably ought to have informed him that she’d offered to teach a few of his servants to read.

She would have said as much just then, but he was so devilishly handsome, his hair so moon-dampened. “Will it wait till morning, my lord?”

“It bloody hell won’t wait, Miss Finch.” He took his time approaching her, slipped his long fingers around her upper arm, and then turned his back to her terrorized class, shielding her from the dread in their eyes, surrounding her with the riotous scent of him.

“What is it, my lord?”

A muscle flickered in his cheek. “What the devil are you teaching, madam?”

“It’s a reading lesson.”

“A lesson in sedition, you mean. Straight from your radical philosophies.”

“From the Magna Carta, my lord. Hardly sedition.” She held up the folio sheet for him to see, which only made him frown. “The foundation of the English Constitution.”

“I know damned well what the Magna Carta is—”

“Translated, of course, from the original Latin.”

“Translated by whom? One of your husband’s radical cronies?”

“By me. And printed on my Stanhope some time ago.” When he didn’t move, when he continued to stare at her, Hollie offered him the folio. “If you suspect my motives, then you can verify it for yourself.”

He snatched the page from her and studied it fiercely, his eyes never lighting long enough anywhere to read a word of it. He finally grunted, and his breathing became less ragged. He scanned her face, a hitch in his brow.

“What happened to ‘cat’ and ‘dog,’ Miss Finch? Why confuse them with this ancient and inscrutable legal document?”

“It’s only inscrutable in the whole. The parts are very simple. Cat and dog are here too, my
lord. And lots of other words. Hundreds of them, ready to be used anywhere, just as I had been saying when you entered.”

“Balderdash.”

The lout must be thinking that she was trying to subvert his staff. And he’d be exactly right. “I was just reading my favorite section—”

“‘No man shall be seized or imprisoned.’ I’m sure you were.” The man had such a remarkable memory for words. And yet he always seemed so averse to them. Sometimes they outright angered him, no matter the subject, as though he believed they had some power over him.

Which they did. Knowledge was the root of power. And she had every intention of spreading it around wherever she met ignorance and intolerance and stubborn earls.

Hollie stepped around the heady wall that was Charles and found a half-dozen pairs of eyes riveted to the man standing behind her. He’d stunned the entire class with his visit, though probably not for the same reason that her heart began pounding whenever he came near.

The gardener’s assistant looked ready to bolt, his mouth hanging open. It would take her the rest of the session to regain their trust.

“Which of all the words in the Magna Carta do you like best so far, Clyde?”

“Me, miss?” Clyde flinched but stood up slowly, hunching his lanky frame as though he
were afraid to be seen by his lordship. “My favorite word?”

“Of all the words you’ve heard so far tonight.” Charles was still a heated, growling force behind her.

“Well, I guess that would be this one.” Clyde nodded toward the top of the page. “‘Dub-lin.’”

Hollie heard Charles’s snort, felt him peering over her shoulder as she searched for the word. “Ah, ‘Henry, Archbishop of Dublin.’ Why Dublin, Clyde?”

The young man smiled with all his teeth. “’Cause my da come from there when he was a boy.”

“I’ve got a favorite word, Miss Finch.” Katie, the young girl from the scullery, hung halfway out of her chair, waving her arm in the air.

“What is it, Katie?”

The girl shot to her feet and screwed up her brow as she spelled out, with great drama, “T-H-E.”

“The.”

“Yes.”

“That’s your favorite because…?”

“It’s everywhere, Miss Finch!” The girl stabbed the page a half-dozen times. “Here and here and all around. All I gotta do is learn all the ones in between.”

Charles felt a great welling in his chest, something akin to hope and anger and adoration for
the woman who lighted this dark world of theirs with her patience. He was holding too tightly to the copy she’d given him, crinkling it.

“What’s your favorite word, my lord?”

She was looking right at him, earnestly waiting for him to play along with her eager class, while the ink danced and mocked him, while he struggled to recall the words in the Great Charter so that he wouldn’t look the fool. He knew the document well, another feat of memory that had saved him in his youth, but she had scrambled his concentration again.

She could ruin him, would surely do so if she ever got the slightest notion. But now it was coming back to him: the coping, the cunning of the classroom.

He steadied his breathing and said with nonchalance, “I suppose my favorite word would be ‘forever.’”

The delight that swept across her face made his heart skip like a fool’s. “Why that particular word, Lord Everingham?”

Because it makes me think of you, makes me wish beyond reason.

“Because it’s the very last word of the last article of a damned long document.” Even as his reply left his lips, he regretted saying it because it made her sigh.

“Well, then, would you care to sit and observe, my lord? We’re almost finished for the evening.”

A classroom. It should have chilled him, but it
was so unlike the sterile attic room of his childhood and the strict, echoing halls of his school-days. And these were Hollie’s eager students, still watching him in terror, ready to skitter out the door, completely unaware that their teacher was a miracle to him.

“I’ll stay for a time, perhaps.”

Sit, boy. You won’t learn till you sit.

He’d done his best to thwart his teachers, to keep them from knowing the worst of his fears.

But this one said in her natural kindness, “It means a lot to them to have you here, my lord.” Her eyes gleamed at him, made him feel wanted and worthy.

He found himself whispering too close to her ear, drowning in her scent. “And you, Hollie?”

But she only smiled, then suddenly shied away from him and went back to her seditious charter.

Fear pinched at the base of his neck as he edged around the perimeter of her make-do classroom with its motley collection of chairs and leaned against the mantel.

The wide eyes that followed him blinked away when she spoke again, and her students went back to their studying, following her quick change of reading material.

“Lark,” she said, and then she spelled it, wrote it on the chalkboard.

They spelled it back to her easily, eagerly, the gardener’s assistant, the young woman from the
scullery, the eldest boy of the rag and bone man from the village, and other familiar faces.

He found himself following along with them under his breath, his heart slamming hard against his ribs.

Because she was magnificent to watch, to hear, and because he understood.

“Hark,” she said, then wrote the word on her standing chalkboard and spelled it aloud. And then, “dark” in the same way. And then “park.”

The simplicity of it. She carefully replaced the first letter each time. Only that. He didn’t recall the names of the letters as they went past but watched in amazement as the others in the words stayed the same.

Ark. And in her magic, she’d made four words of it. Lark and hark and dark and park.

Hark, the lark in the dark park.
He found himself grinning madly, nearly laughing aloud.

“Excellent, class.”

And then it was over, a door slamming shut on a dark dungeon after that one tantalizing moment of pure daylight. He cleared his throat, and her students fled as though the woman had invited a dragon into their midst.

She reentered the parlor, clearly satisfied with herself and their progress. “That went very well.”

“You asked me for permission to teach Chip. I said nothing about starting a dame school in my gatehouse.”

“I didn’t think you’d mind, Charles.” She used
his name softly as she folded up the easel and leaned it against the wall. “Everingham Hall will profit from the lessons—though this is thoroughly selfish of me. I couldn’t resist making new readers for the
Tuppenny Press
, if I ever get the chance to start it up again.”

“And if you don’t?”
Because I can’t let you, Hollie.

She nudged a ladderback chair under the table. “Then they’ll have to read all about reforming the Parliament in
The Times
.”

Charles followed her lead and righted a few of the chairs. “Ah, and if you were the Prime Minster, what reforms would you institute?”

She sniffed as she picked up the strewn pages of her lesson. “Very well, my first would be to enact a secret ballot.”

“Voting in secret?” He should have known she’d have opinions beyond an ordinary woman’s. Because she wasn’t anything near to ordinary. “A man should be confident enough in his own character to vote in the clear light of day.”

“Unless that man has a landlord or a master who threatens him or his family or his family’s fortune if he doesn’t vote the way he’s directed. You can’t say that doesn’t happen.”

No, he couldn’t. He didn’t practice coercion himself, but secrecy was no way to vote one’s heart. “What else do you propose to your Parliament, madam?”

“Universal suffrage.”

“Now there’s a foolish notion.”

“For both men and women.”

He laughed as he added a few logs to the guttering fire, reveling in the domestic peace between them, trying not to imagine a lifetime of nights with her. “You can’t possibly mean that, Hollie. Giving women the vote—”

She leveled a finger at him, shaking her head as she came toward him. “Don’t, Charles.”

“Don’t?” He opened his hands as she backed him against the small desktop, knowing it best for both if he hid his urge to smile, better still if he kept his hands from reaching out to span her waist as they were aching to do.

“I know that scoff only too well, sir.” She fitted herself perfectly between his knees, and the temptation struck him breathless. “I’ve heard it all from the day I was born, even from my own father. It’s male and hairy and it’s universal and it’s ballocks.”