it was made by someone you don’t know half as well, then tell me truthfully you don’t want the post, Rowena,’ her friend called after her.
Rowena turned back to nod agreement, then shrugged ruefully as the squeals of her little sister’s victims became too overexcited for comfort. She needed to restore order before there were tears as well as giggles of high delight to disturb the serious-looking conversation her parents were having with Sir Gideon and Lord Laughraine.
‘Reverend Finch and his lady have a fine brood of children. I wonder how they fit them all in to even the most generous parsonage. At least the lovely Miss Joanna will be off their hands soon, since her banns were read today. Which only leaves them with Mrs Westhope to get wed again before the next young lady is of marriageable age, don’t you think?’ Henry Bowood said so casually James knew he was being twitted on his reluctant fascination with the even lovelier widow.
The man saw too much, always had. James resolved to be more wary and stop watching the widow Westhope from now on. ‘Aye, they appear to have had a long and fruitful marriage,’ he agreed easily, as if it was of no matter and neither was the retiring beauty who hid in churchyards and sometimes looked as if she knew too much about life outside this lovely rural sanctuary for comfort.
He knew that feeling too well and the Vicar of Raigne’s eldest daughter intrigued him. Not that she’d done a thing to catch or hold his interest in the entire month she’d been back in the Raigne villages, he forced himself to acknowledge. He reluctantly turned his attention from the cavorting children and surprisingly indulgent referee to his fellow guest.
‘Jealous?’ he asked cynically, raising one eyebrow to add emphasis to the question and hoping the spymaster’s son would be diverted.
‘If I ever felt the want of a family, conveying two of your mixed bag of brats across the Channel and taking them to their new foster parents would have cured me very rapidly,’ Bowood countered wryly.
Aye, James decided, it was high time he forgot golden-haired enchantresses with cobalt-blue eyes and all the possibilities they would never explore together and concentrated on the true facts of his life. ‘I can’t thank you enough for doing that for me, Harry. I could have endangered them now Fouché knows I’m not a simple merchant. You’re the only other man skilled and wily enough to get them into cleaner hands than mine and safe at last.’
‘You still don’t trust me with the location of Hebe’s brat, though. The other two you picked out of the gutters once their parents met their end could do with being part of a family,’ Bowood said stiffly.
‘Better you don’t know, considering the lengths the head of Bonaparte’s police will go to in order to break the spy ring he’s been gleefully taking apart since he got parts of it out of Hebe La Courte before her jailers went too far and killed her. If he has Hebe’s child, every single one of us will be at his mercy and he knows it.’
‘Not all of us are as soft-hearted as you, James,’ Bowood said.
This was no time to feel as if a cold hand had been laid on the back of his neck, James told himself, even as he wondered how ruthless Harry Bowood would be if need arose. The happy shouts of children and the joyous song of a robin in a nearby tree faded away and he frowned at the terrible memory of his last botched mission to Paris. Even now he didn’t know why he had had such a strong feeling he must go there and find out for himself what was wrong. The awful sight of his one-time lover’s twisted and mangled body, cast into the darkest alley at the dark heart of the old city when her interrogators went too far extracting her secrets, made him shudder in the mellow sunlight of an English Sunday. Lucky Hebe’s child was not yet three years old and would probably forget her lovely, reckless mother in time.
‘That’s not softness, but guilt,’ he confessed bleakly.
‘You take responsibility for the orphans of your smoky trade and call it guilt?’ Bowood said rather less cautiously than usual. James’s turn to eye him sceptically and hope it would remind him to be quieter.
‘Why not? The good reverend would say I deserve to feel it after all I have done and not done in the cause of who knows what these last few years.’
‘Society is so wrong about you, James Winterley. You have the heart and soul of a monk, not an idle man of fashion.’
‘Do I now?’ James said, brooding over how a monk would feel about such locked-down mysteries as Mr Finch’s eldest daughter. Even less easy with the temptation to knock off her awful bonnet and run his hands through that heavy mass of gold hair until it curled down her back and softened her wary face than this particular idle man of fashion was, he suspected.
‘James, the horses have been standing too long,’ his brother called impatiently from the lychgate and James shrugged off all thoughts of shocking the Vicar of Raigne’s daughter to her buttoned-up core.
‘I could walk, if I really had to, Big Brother,’ he drawled as annoyingly as he could manage, because it hurt to feel the estrangement between them strong as ever on such a fine and family-intimate day.
‘No doubt you can, but the question is what you’d do if you ever got those spotless Hessians of yours mired with a speck of dust or, heaven forbid, a scratch?’
‘Oh, give them to my valet, of course. I couldn’t possibly wear them again after that,’ James replied with a weary sigh, as if the depleted contents of his wardrobe troubled him far more than his brother’s low opinion.
‘Idle fop,’ Lord Farenze said impatiently and, since that was exactly the reaction he’d been looking for, why did it hurt?
‘James is teasing you, Luke,’ Lady Chloe Winterley, Viscountess Farenze, told her husband of six months gently.
James wasn’t sure if he loved or deplored her keen wits and kindness most right now. With Bowood always on the alert at his side, he wasn’t sure he wanted his estrangement from his brother taken out and inspected. It was what got him into this murky business in the first place, after all, and Bowood was one of the few who knew the truth about that dark time in the Winterley brothers’ lives. How could he not when James had fled to his school friend’s home and spilt his terrible new secrets into Harry’s ears that awful summer when he was seventeen and Luke was married to a vixen? Thank heaven his brother had found such happiness in his second marriage, even if it took him ten years too long to admit he couldn’t live without her any longer. The damage Pamela did to the Winterley brothers made James shiver, as if the doxy’s ghost was sitting nearby glorying over the rift she drove between them as gleefully as she did the day she made it.
‘High time I let Finch and his lady gather up their brood in peace,’ Lord Laughraine intervened, ever the bluff host. James marvelled once more that he’d found this haven in the storm his life had become this summer, and his lordship and his heir actually seemed to mean it when they pressed him to stay on now summer was over and Sir Gideon Laughraine was a very happily married man once more.
Riding back to Raigne in Gideon’s shiny new carriage through lanes already showing hints of autumn in the rich red of hawthorn berries and glossy blackberries basking in the October sun, James acknowledged Bowood’s arrival had taken some of the shine off the quiet country life he’d embraced this summer by buying a tumbledown old wreck of a house up in the Raigne Hills and the neglected estate that went with it. Brackley Manor, made of the local honey-grey stone and so ancient nobody had much idea when it was built, called to something in him. He didn’t want to call his instinctive attachment to a house the romantic whim Harry dismissed it as when he found out why James had lingered in this peaceful corner of England for so long. Yet Harry was probably right. The neglect of half a century made him long to see it come alive again under his care and it felt right to build something instead of plotting to destroy it, to restore instead of ruin a home, even if he wasn’t worthy of a happy retirement on his acres with a plump and contented little wife and a brood of children to make the old house a real home again.