Vixen (5 page)

“Well, I do usually,” she replied, wandering toward the pantry in a rather roundabout fashion, as if to disguise her destination. “It usually saves a deal of time, but I don’t think you’re going to be sympathetic.”

“Imagine you’re lookin’ for summat to give that cat of your’n,” Samuel remarked as Chloe peered into the pantry.

“And just where is the cat?” demanded Hugo.

“In my room.”

“Your
room?” His eyebrows vanished into his scalp.

“Samuel told me to choose which I liked,” she said, turning back to the kitchen. “I hope that was all right. It’s a corner room, but there aren’t any sheets on the bed. I was going to ask Samuel where I could find some.”

Hugo closed his eyes. Things seemed to be getting out of hand. “You aren’t staying here, Chloe.”

“But where else am I to go?” The deep blue eyes took on a purplish hue, and he didn’t like what he read in them. She was expecting something hurtful.

“I have to discuss it with Scranton,” he said.

“Why does no one ever want me?” she said so softly he barely caught the words.

He swung his leg off the chair arm, stirred despite himself. “Don’t be silly,” he said, going over to her. “That’s not it at all. You can’t stay here because I don’t have an appropriate household … you must see that, lass.” He caught her chin, lifting it. Her eyes still had that purplish hue, but the soft mouth was set.

“I don’t see why,” she said. “I could keep house for you. Someone needs to.”

“Not an heiress with a fortune of eighty thousand pounds,” he said, smiling at this absurdity. “And Samuel keeps house for me.”

“Not very well,” she stated. “It’s so dirty everywhere.”

“Got enough to do, wi’out worryin’ over a peck o’ dust,” Samuel grumbled. “If you want to eat, miss, ye’d best come to the table. I can’t spend all day in the kitchen.”

“I have to feed Beatrice first,” Chloe demurred. “She’s suckling all those kittens.”

Hugo seized the change of subject with relief. He had little to lose by accommodating her in this area. By this evening Chloe Gresham and her dependents would be respectably installed elsewhere. Scranton was bound to have some further information that would provide a solution.
“I suppose she can stay upstairs for the time being. But the dog is not to come inside.”

“I don’t see why it should matter. The house is already so dirty, Dante isn’t going to make it worse.”

“Has nobody ever told you that it’s extremely impolite to criticize one’s hospitality?” Hugo demanded, good resolutions forgotten in the face of this intransigent refusal to accept the compromise. “Particularly when one is an uninvited guest.”

“That’s not my fault. If you bothered to read your letters—” she fired back. “Anyway, why don’t you?”

“Because there is never anything of the slightest interest in them … if it’s any of your business, miss,” he snapped, stalking to the door. “I suggest you stop making a nuisance of yourself and eat your nuncheon.” The door banged on his departure.

Why didn’t he bother to open his mail? Hugo pondered the question as he went into the library, wondering also why he’d allowed himself to be drawn into a pointless squabble with an argumentative and irritating schoolgirl. No wonder the Misses Trent had been so ready to see the back of her. Ten years of that would try the patience of Job.

He picked up the pile of letters and glanced through them. The truth, of course, was that he didn’t want any reminders of the past. He didn’t want to hear news of the people he had once known so well. He didn’t want anything to do with the world he had once inhabited. The memories of the past were so hideous, and he couldn’t summon a spark of interest for the future. He hadn’t been able to since the war ended, and he’d returned to his sadly deteriorated family home and the recognition that apart from Denholm Manor and an equally dilapidated house in London, he was without financial resources. What fortune he’d had he’d run through in those two years with the Congregation of
Eden before the duel. It hadn’t been more than a competency, anyway, but with careful management he could have kept a wife, set up his nursery, maintained the estate, and even taken his wife to London for the Season. But one is not wise at eighteen, and his trustees had exerted no control over the willful, dissolute youth in their charge.

After the duel, in a frenzy of guilt and misery, he had ridden to Liverpool and taken the king’s shilling aboard the frigate
Hotspur.
One year before the mast had stripped all vestige of privilege, of youthful excess, from him. It had honed and hardened him. At twenty-one he was promoted from the ranks to midshipman and, as the war took its toll, he moved rapidly upward. Within three years he was commanding his own ship of the line.

During those years he was able to forget … except at night, when the nightmares came a-visiting. They were relentless and as far as possible he chose not to sleep during the hours of darkness.

But with Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo had come peace. He’d taken his conge of the king’s service and here he was, whiling away his days on the Lancashire moors and his nights in the Manchester stews.

And he was not interested in his mail.

He flung the letters down on the table and picked up a bottle from the sideboard. Its dusty coating indicated vintage rather than poor housekeeping. He glanced at the clock. Half past noon. A bit early for the first brandy of the day, but what did it matter? What did anything matter?

“W
hy doesn’t Sir Hugo open his mail?” Chloe asked Samuel as she spread butter lavishly on a crust of bread.

“None of your business, like ’e said” was the uncompromising
response. Samuel dumped dishes in a bucket of water.

Chloe cut a wedge of cheese and chewed in silence for a minute. “Why are you the only servant?”

“Inquisitive, aren’t you?”

“Perhaps … but why?”

“No need for anyone else. Do right enough on our own.” Samuel walked to the door. “There’s a chicken wing in the pantry. Reckon it’ll do for that cat.”

“And Dante?” Chloe said hastily, as he seemed about to disappear.

“E’ll get what the hounds get. Ask young Billy in the stables.” He opened the back door.

“And sheets,” Chloe said. “Where will I find sheets for my bed?”

Samuel turned slowly. “Still reckon on stayin’?”

“Oh, yes,” Chloe said with conviction. “I am going nowhere, Samuel.”

He snorted, whether with derision or amusement, she couldn’t tell. “There’s prob’ly summat that’ll do in the cupboard on the upstairs landing. ’Elp yourself.”

L
awyer Scranton was a short, fat man with bristling white whiskers and a bald head. He rode into the courtyard on a round cob at the end of the afternoon and dismounted, huffing and puffing as he looked around.

Chloe observed him from her perch on top of an upturned rain barrel in the corner of the yard, then stood up and came over to him, Dante at her heels. “There’s a lad called Billy who’ll take your horse,” she offered.

Scranton smoothed the skirts of his brown coat and adjusted his cravat, peering myopically at her. “Do I have the honor of addressing Miss Gresham?”

Chloe nodded solemnly, swallowing the bubble of
laughter at this pomposity. “My guardian is in the house somewhere.”

“I should hope so!” The lawyer huffed again. He was not accustomed to receiving brusque summonses, and Sir Hugo’s had been imperious in its curt urgency. He cast a critical glance around the disheveled courtyard, littered with straw and manure. One of the stable doors hung crooked on its hinges.

A youth emerged from the tack room, sucking on a piece of straw. He kicked an iron bucket, sending it clattering across the cobbles, and sauntered over.

“This is Billy,” Chloe said. “Will you take Mr. Scranton’s horse, Billy?”

“Reckon so,” the youth said, lethargically lifting the reins. He clicked his tongue against his teeth and the fat cob ambled off beside him to the stables.

“Shall we go in?” Chloe offered a hostess’s smile even as she wondered which of the dust-laden gloomy rooms would be appropriate for entertaining the guest.

She preceded Lawyer Scranton up the steps. At the door she instructed a disconsolate Dante to stay, and went into the cool of the great hall. The heavier items of her luggage were still lying around, since she couldn’t manage to carry them upstairs herself and had seen no one but Billy since her nuncheon in the kitchen.

She took a step toward the library, when the door opened and Hugo stood on the threshold, holding a glass and a bottle by its neck in one hand.

“Oh, there you are, Scranton,” he said shortly. “Come into the kitchen. We have to sort this mess out. I hope to God you’ve got some answers.”

The kitchen was certainly the most welcoming room in the house, Chloe reflected. The lawyer didn’t seem taken aback at the invitation, and she followed the two men.

Hugo, his shoulder holding the door open for his visitor,
seemed to notice her for the first time. He frowned, then said, “Oh, well, I suppose it’s as much your business as anyone’s. Come on in.”

“You weren’t going to leave me out?” she demanded in some indignation, wondering why his eyes had become rather clouded.

“To tell you the truth, I hadn’t thought about it one way or the other.” He put his free hand between her shoulder blades and propelled her into the kitchen ahead of him.

Chloe was not surprised to see that Samuel was to be present at this discussion. He was dividing his attentions between a sirloin of beef turning on the spit in the fireplace and a basket of mushrooms he was picking through on the table.

The lawyer sat at the table and accepted a glass of port. Hugo refilled his own glass from the brandy bottle he held, and sat down. Chloe, who was feeling ignored, sat down and filled a glass of port for herself. She’d never drunk anything stronger than claret hitherto, and took a cautious sip. Hugo gave her a cursory glance, then turned back to Scranton, taking the copy of the will out of his pocket.

“What can be done about this, Scranton?” He slapped the document on the table. “There must be some way to have it overset.”

Chloe sipped her port, deciding that the taste improved on acquaintance.

The lawyer shook his head. “As legal as any will I’ve seen, Sir Hugo. Drew it up myself at Lady Gresham’s dictation. Her ladyship was in sound mind and it was witnessed by my clerk and the housekeeper.”

Hugo looked at the date of the will; It was October 1818. Had he received Elizabeth’s note by then? But he couldn’t remember. It was another of those facts lost in brandy fumes.

“Of course, you’re not the only one who’d like to see it overset.” The lawyer waxed expansive over his second glass of port. “Sir Jasper’s been creating such a ruckus. Storming around my office, swearing it couldn’t stand in a court of law. But I told him it would stand up to anything. As legal as any will I’ve seen, I told him.”

Hugo’s chair scraped on the flagstones as he suddenly pushed back from the table, but he didn’t say anything, his eyes were fixed with intensity on the lawyer.

“You should have heard him.” The lawyer shook his head. “Such a pother. On and on he went about how he was Miss Gresham’s brother—the only fit person to assume guardianship—and it wasn’t fitting for a complete stranger with no ties to the family to have her in charge.”

“He has a point,” Hugo said dryly. And even more of a point if the truth of his dealings with the Greshams were ever to be revealed.

The lawyer seemed not to have heard him. “I told him that the law respects the wishes of the dead above all other claims in these matters, and as far as I could see, there was nothing more to be said.”

Hugo sighed. The last thing he wanted was to find himself at daggers drawn with Jasper Gresham. A river of enmity ran between them already. But he knew that Elizabeth had chosen him because he would stand up to Jasper as no one else would. Chloe and her fortune would need protection from the Greshams, and he’d been designated to provide it. But there had to be a way to distance himself from his charge.

He glanced sideways at the girl, whose stillness and silence had been almost palpable during the lawyer’s peroration. She reached for the port decanter again and he flung his hand out, catching her wrist.

“That’s enough, lass. Samuel, fetch some … some lemonade, or something.”

“But I’m enjoying the port,” Chloe protested.

“Don’t have any lemonade anyways,” Samuel declared, chopping mushrooms with a blinding speed.

“Water, then,” Hugo said. “She’s too young for port in the middle of the afternoon.”

“But you didn’t object before,” Chloe pointed out.

“That was before,” he said with a vague gesture.

“Before what?”

Hugo sighed. “Before it was made irrevocably clear to me that I have no choice but to assume responsibility for you.”

Imps of mischief danced suddenly in her deep blue eyes. “I can’t believe you’re going to be a prim and stuffy guardian, Sir Hugo. How could you be, living the way you do?”

Hugo was momentarily distracted by those enchanting eyes. He shook his head in an effort to dispel the confusing tangle of emotions and turned back to the lawyer, forgetting the issue of the port.

Chloe, with a tiny smile of triumph, filled her glass.

“I understand Miss Gresham was a pupil at a seminary in Bolton,” Scranton was saying.

“Unfortunately, there was a lovelorn curate, a butcher’s boy, and Miss Anne Trent’s nephew,” Hugo said with a wry grin. “The estimable Misses Trent found the lass too hot to hold. However, there must be another such establishment—”

“No!” Chloe broke in with a cry. “No, I will not go to another seminary. I absolutely will not.” Her voice shook at the thought of being packed off yet again like some unwanted animal, banished again to a confinement that had become unendurable in its loneliness. “If you attempt such a thing, I shall simply run away.”

Hugo swung his head toward her and the green eyes were no longer clouded. They held her gaze steadily,
and she almost fancied little spurts of flame in their vivid depths.

“Are you challenging me, Miss Gresham?” he asked very softly.