Oh, yes, and more change as well: she must leave the house where she’d been born and find a new place for herself to live. No wonder she was walking so fast now she was nearly running.
“Hold now, Miss Winslow, don’t flight off like this,” he said, his long stride easily keeping pace with hers. “We’ve matters to discuss.”
She kept her gaze straight ahead, quickening her step. “We do not.”
“And I say we do.” He wheeled around, blocking her way. “Isn’t there some place more private than the middle of the street where we can talk?”
“I told you,” she said, trying to step around him, “there is nothing to be said!”
“But there is.” He caught her arm to stop her, his grasp through the rough linsey-woolsey of her sleeve hard enough to make her gasp indignantly. “I don’t give a tinker’s dam if we talk here where the whole world can listen. But knowing these are your people, I’d think you’d want it otherwise.”
Fan glared at him and jerked her arm free, rubbing furiously at the spot where he’d held her as if to wipe away his touch. What he said was true; there was never much privacy to be found in a village like this, where everyone knew everyone else’s business. Even now she and the captain were drawing a sizeable audience, curious faces peering from open windows and over walls, and she didn’t want to think what sort of tales the company men would be hearing.
“This way, then,” she said curtly, heading across the lane and leaving him to follow her into the yard of the little church, stopping when they were surrounded only by overgrown headstones of long-dead villagers and the empty graves of sailors who’d perished at sea. “There’s no one here who’ll spread gossip.”
“Very well,” he said, glancing dubiously around at the old slanting headstones, the carved names and dates softened by the wind and patched with moss and lichen. The breeze from the marshes and the sea blew more insistently here in the open, tossing the heavy tassels on her shawl against her hip and ruffling his hair across his forehead. “Dead men tell no tales, eh?”
“Why should the dead trouble you?” she demanded bitterly. “Considering your trade’s as much killing as sailing, I’d vow that you’d be more familiar with the dead than the living.”
“You cannot have life without death,” he said quietly. “One goes with the other, doesn’t it?”
A chill shivered down her spine. No matter how often she’d pleaded with him to stop, her father had often spoken that way of death as well, as if he almost wished to court his own end. How was she any better, speaking like this while standing among so many graves?
“Life goes with death, yes,” she countered, striving to put her darker thoughts aside, “but few can find as much profit in it as you have.”
“Luck is as unpredictable as death, you know. I could as easily have been shot to pieces by French guns as be standing here with you now.” He tried to smile, but his expression seemed clouded now, without the earlier happiness, and she wondered if he, too, felt the grim pull of the burying ground. “You are angry because I have bought the house you regard as your home.”
“It is not my place to be angry,” she said sadly, for of course he was right, “even if you are taking away the only home I have ever known.”
He shook his head, frowning. “Hold now, I’ve not said that.”
“You didn’t need to say a word, not when your actions are so clear!” she cried forlornly. “You’ve no use for our old ways here, and you’ve even brought your own people as servants. What place can there be left for me at Feversham?”
“Have I asked you to leave?”
“Have you needed to?” She lifted her chin, determined to not let him see her cry. “I’ll not trouble you overmuch, Captain My Lord. That’s not my way. I shall gather my things and be gone by nightfall, and you’ll need not give me another thought.”
“The hell I won’t,” he said sharply, his frown deepening. “You’re not to leave, not unless you wish it. I’ll have need of your special knowledge of the house, the tradespeople in this county, the neighbors—a thousand things, I’m sure, if you’ll but share them. I’ve no intention of sending you out of your home, especially not with your father gone.”
“My father’s not dead,” she said quickly, shoving aside a piece of hair that had blown free of her cap and across her forehead. “I know it. He will come back.”
“I’m sure he will,” he said with gruff kindness. “And he should find you at Feversham when he does.”
Her resolution wobbled, and tears stung behind her eyes. How long had it been since anyone had shown her any manner of kindness at all, gruff or not? To take her father’s place leading the Company, she’d had to appear twice as competent, twice as emotionless as Father had ever been. Such leaders didn’t expect sympathy or kindness, nor did they get it. To feel it now, standing in the windswept burying ground and from this man, was almost more than she could bear, and far more than she could wish.
“Father would never look for me anywhere else,” she said softly. “I was born at Feversham, you see. My mother was the cook, when the old master still had guests to look after. Not that I can remember those times, or my mother, either.”
The captain nodded, more understanding than she’d expected. “I can scarce recall my mother, either, she died so young.”
“It fell to my father and my aunt to look after me,” she said. She didn’t know why she was telling him this, for surely these ordinary details of her life would be of no interest to anyone else. “My aunt was the housekeeper before me, and trained me well in the skills and arts of running Feversham. ‘The mysteries’, she called them, as if she were a very witch, and not the most pious woman in the parish.”
He smiled, the lines crinkling around the corners of his eyes the way she’d remembered. The last time he’d smiled at her like this had been when she’d shown him the mistress’s bedchamber, and he’d teased her about trying the bed. He’d made her heart thump and her thoughts race off in all kinds of wrongful ways.
“I expect you were the most attentive and adept of students,” he was saying now, “whatever the day’s mystery.”
“Oh, hardly,” she said, recalling how often her aunt had rapped her knuckles with the long handle of a wooden spoon. “Aunt called me Miss Fan Fidgets, on account of my never paying proper attention. I always longed to be out-of-doors when I was little, you see, and didn’t always heed her explaining how to take the tea-stains from the Irish linen and mildew from the plaster, or how always to speak as much like the gentry as I could.”
“That’s what your aunt called you? Miss Fan Fidgets?” His smile widened with obvious relish. “I can’t repeat any of the names my brothers called me, they were so foul. It’s quite astounding how many mangled versions of a simple ‘George’ boys can concoct when they set their minds to it.”
She smiled then, too, more amazed that he’d confide in her that his brothers had teased him with foul names when they’d been boys. She couldn’t picture having such a conversation with any of the other men she knew, even the ones she’d known since they’d been children together. Perhaps this was another way titled gentlemen were different than ordinary men, or perhaps, more dangerous for her, this was simply the way this particular titled gentleman behaved with her.
“I was the only child of the household,” she confessed wistfully, “which made me more at my ease around my elders than the lads and lasses my own age.”
He glanced at her sideways, beneath the brim of his hat, as if to show how thoroughly he doubted her. “Though surely that is no longer the case.”
She shrugged, twisting her hands into the ends of her shawl. She’d already told him more than enough; he didn’t need to know how few her friends