grass at the side of the rutted road beside the mossy stone fence, he reached into his worn saddlebag and withdrew a bottle, which he tilted and put to his lips.
He lowered it after a moment. “Hardly enough to taste,” he mumbled, tossing the bottle over the hedgerow. He scratched, wondering if he had picked up something more than a bottle of hock at the tavern. Gad, he needed a bath and new clothes. These garments had withstood the voyage from Lower Canada, but they couldn’t take much more wear.
If any of his friends from London should see him, they would think he had indeed suffered these past five years. Adrian would say it was no more than he deserved
but he wasn’t going to think about Adrian.
Then he looked back the way he had come. No. Nobody there. Thank God. He didn’t have the strength of a baby at the moment.
The man shook his head. “Doesn’t do to think about that,” he murmured, staggering back toward the horse. “I couldn’t have done anything else.”
Then, with a soft curse, he clambered onto his mount. “How the mighty have fallen, eh, my Pegasus?” he said to the horse. “Let us away!”
The beast lurched into motion and started down the road, eventually coming out of the woods to what appeared to be the junction of this road and a farmer’s lane. The man strained to see any kind of a sign, but either his eyes were going, or the light was fading, or he was just too drunk, because he couldn’t find one. Not so much as a white cross.
Just where the devil was he? Why couldn’t the local inhabitants have signposts, like other civilized people? He should have disembarked at Liverpool, or Dover, not Yarmouth.
He knew he must be somewhere to the southwest of Boston, still close enough to the fens to catch a marshy whiff of the breeze blowing over the plowed fields too often for his comfort. The land was getting less flat, though, and every now and then, he spied a sheep.
Lincolnshire was terrible country, he thought grumpily, and the roads were the most terrible thing about it. Once he got out of here, he’d never come back. If he got out of here. If he didn’t keep going around in circles, and if Boffin and his gang didn’t find him…
Surely there must be an inn somewhere in this godforsaken countryside, where he could play a few card games and earn enough for a meal.
He pulled his soiled jacket tighter. The weather was damnably cold for England in April, but not nearly as cold as some of the places he had been since he had left the country. That was why he had come back, of course. The weather. Only the weather.
He still had no wish to see his family. Not his mother, who had betrayed him. Or his half brother, with his condescending self-righteousness. He could imagine the martyr’s face and hear his admonishing words.
And certainly not his half brother’s wife.
His mother would be glad to know he was alive, of course. His spoiled, indulgent, vain mother, who had given her son whatever he wanted, until he was as vain and spoiled as she.
No one had ever had to tell him such things; he had realized early in his school days what he was. It had never troubled him, and as for Adrian, he was jealous. Not just because of the mother who had come into his house to replace his own, but because their father had loved his second son, too. Which was only right.
He didn’t need or want to see Adrian or anybody else in his family. To live in anticipation of the condemnation sure to come his way. To see the disrespect in his sibling’s eyes. To hear his mother sing his praises, and know that she did so only because he was her son, not for any merit she believed he possessed.
Suddenly, the nag stumbled on the mud-slick road. It quickly regained its footing, but not before the young man slipped from the saddle. He lay on his stomach, then tried to stand, too drunk to make much of a success of it. “I’ll just rest a moment,” he mumbled, lying down and laying his head on his arms.
In another moment, Lord Elliot Fitzwalter, second son of the fifth Duke of Barroughby, was fast asleep in a Lincolnshire ditch.
The indomitable old woman sat staring out the window, her back straight and her gaze fastened on the long, sweeping drive that led to Barroughby Hall before continuing to her habitation.
The Dower House stood on a low rise, and at one time, before the present dowager duchess’s occupation, it had been screened from Barroughby Hall by a row of larch trees. The dowager duchess had ordered them cut down, the better to see over the large lawn past the ornate gardens to the drive and the front entrance of the hall.
As she looked out, she paid no heed to the young couple who had quietly entered the tastefully furnished drawing room. The man was dark haired, tall, handsome and serious; his wife was not a great beauty, but there was a calm serenity to her features that the duke considered far more lovely.
The Duke of Barroughby glanced at his wife, and then addressed his stepmother. “Good afternoon, Your Grace.”
The dowager duchess did not turn to look at her visitors. She knew who they were; they came to the Dower House every day when they were in residence at the ducal seat. “Have you heard from him?” she demanded, as she did every time they called.
“No, Your Grace,” the duke’s wife replied softly.
“He will come tomorrow,” the dowager duchess said firmly, as she always did, referring to her beloved son, who had stormed from Barroughby Hall nearly five years ago after a bitter and angry confrontation. “Leave me now.”
Adrian and Hester looked at each other and obeyed, each of them silently wondering how long the dowager duchess could maintain her daily vigil before she gave up hope of ever seeing her cherished son again, for Elliot Fitzwalter had sworn that he would never set eyes on his family again.
Between themselves, they thought he must be dead. No one had heard from him. There had been no letters to his doting mother, and perhaps more surprisingly, no demands for money to his half brother. Every inquiry had been fruitless. There had not been even a whisper of a rumor concerning the handsome young nobleman.
It was as if Elliot, in his determination to be rid of his family, had disappeared from the face of the earth.
Chapter Two
Grace hurried along the road, no longer running, but walking as quickly as her laboring lungs would allow. A light rain had started to fall, and her high-top boots would be thick with mud if she was not home soon.
She was also mindful of the ruffians she had seen loitering outside The Three Crowns that afternoon. There had been many itinerant workers in Lincolnshire of late, causing some unrest, and certainly a sense of unease. Donald Franklin had brought over many poor Irish to work on his estate, and there were others, like those men today, who she suspected had never done an honest day’s work in their lives. Why they were in Barton-by-the-Fens was a mystery, and Grace hoped they wouldn’t linger, or, worse, come along this particular stretch of road.
She glanced back over her shoulder, then sighed with relief. Mercy would say it was only her imagination running away with her again, but Mercy had never understood how upsetting it could be when one’s mind persisted in creating vivid pictures of possibilities, most of them bad.
Grace halted abruptly. There was a bundle of clothing in the ditch. Some poor soul was going to be the worse for that. Maybe she should take it to the vicar.
She went closer to investigate and let out a gasp of shocked surprise, for it wasn’t an abandoned bundle of clothing: it was a man lying there, not moving.
For a moment Grace’s heart seemed to stop beating, until she saw his back rise and fall as he breathed. “Not dead,” she murmured with relief.
She regarded him from where she stood, nearly five feet away. His trousers and jacket were not clean, something not unexpected when one was lying in a ditch. His hat had tumbled off and lay on its side nearby, so she could see his rather unkempt blond hair. His shoulders were broad, his hips narrow,