Miss Trethayne just did at you,’ Peters joked down below in the stable yard as he and his latest employer led their tired horses through the stable doors Dacre had flung open as if he’d been waiting for his lordship to come home too.
‘If I ever catch you watching her with that glint in your eyes again, I’ll black at least one of them for you,’ Tom told him brusquely and for once couldn’t have cared less what his supposed secretary thought his feelings for Miss Polly Trethayne might be.
‘No need, I have the sense to see when a woman has hardly noticed I live on the same planet, even if you are wilfully blind about your feelings for her.’
‘A little less of both than I was when you left for London,’ Tom said softly as the image of her, warm and dry and wistful as she gazed out of that window like a princess in her tower wishing she had a prince on the way, replayed through his mind.
‘Less wilful, or less blind?’
‘How plain do I have to be? I know she is like no other woman I ever met, that any man who could call her his would need to thank his maker on his knees for her every morning and work hard to deserve her for the rest of the day and into the night.’
‘A delightful pastime, no doubt, but why does there seem to be a “but” running under all that promising infatuation?’
‘You have the devil of a sharp tongue, man; are you related to the Winterleys by any chance?’
‘Not that I know of,’ Peters said as soberly as any judge, but Tom was beginning to know him well enough to be certain he was laughing at both of them for some reason best known to himself. ‘And the “but”?’
‘But I’m hardly the sort of man who deserves the love of a good woman.’
‘If we all had to wait to be worthy of that, the human race would have died out long ago.’
‘Yet if what you say is true, Miss Trethayne will soon have the chance to meet a man who can offer her so much that I cannot.’
‘A castle, perhaps? A comfortable lifestyle at the heart of the ton? Or do you think she might prefer a fortune not even laying out funds to support half the countryside can make a dent in?’
‘Please don’t think accusing her of being a gold-digger will make me furious enough to give away some phantom truth about my feelings for Miss Trethayne, Peters. I’m not some naive young fool up from the country.’
‘It might be better if you were.’
‘Better for whom?’
‘For you of course, my lord,’ the man said abruptly and made way for one of the grooms to take over caring for his tired horse as if he couldn’t endure the company of such an idiot for very much longer.
‘He’s right, lad,’ Dacre informed him.
‘Not you as well,’ Tom mumbled with a tight frown he hoped would put the man off one of his homilies.
‘Me more than anyone, m’lord. Her ladyship trusted me to keep you from riding straight to the devil when you was younger than Master Josh and I ain’t done yet.’
‘Thank you,’ Tom said as the fury died out of him at the sight of genuine concern in the old groom’s eyes. ‘You always were more patient with me than I deserved.’
‘High time someone was,’ Dacre said gruffly, as uneasy with speaking of his feelings as Tom had ever been, but doing it all the same.
How humbling to know his old friend had more courage than he did, but perhaps this was his day for being humble.
‘Any woman worth her salt wants to make her own choice, boy, and that one’s worth a lot more,’ Dacre told him with a severe nod and went to fetch the warm mash he had ready for the unlucky gelding who had gone so hard for him all afternoon.
‘Anything to say?’ he challenged the weary animal as he finished grooming it and stopped to pet him. ‘No? You must be the only one who hasn’t today,’ he murmured in the gelding’s responsive ears and even his own weariness wasn’t enough to blot out the feeling he’d done the most stupid day’s work he’d ever done by walking away from all he could be as Miss Paulina Trethayne’s grateful lover.
* * *
Polly refused to go across the courtyard to dinner that night and sat in her lofty room, staring into the fire that would never have been lit on a soaking May evening before the marquis came home. She sighed at the thought of how much had changed here since she saw him that first time, like some gilded god come down from Olympus to play stable hand for a day.
Feeling sad and forsaken and thoroughly out of sorts with herself and the rest of the world, she tried hard not to turn into a watering pot when Toby came up the stairs with a plate carefully covered to keep it warm and insisted on watching over her while she ate. How could she refuse to do so like some fine lady in a fit of pique when he had taken so much trouble to look after her? Luckily he was also old and wise enough to know she didn’t want to talk about what was upsetting her, but a little later Hal and Josh tapped on her door and sidled in, looking as if they thought it was their fault she was blue-devilled.
It was no good, she decided with despair eating even deeper into her than it had before. She couldn’t do it. Not even for the sake of loving Lord Mantaigne as she so badly wanted him to let her love him could she cut herself off from her brothers. Since her stepmother had died when Josh was a baby, Polly had tried to fill the gaping holes in his little life as best she could. Then there was her usually serious and studious middle brother, who sometimes lost himself in a book as determinedly as Lord Mantaigne did in his life of hedonistic pleasure.
Did Hal hide the same sort of sensitivity behind a front of self-sufficiency as his lordship did then? Unlikely, Polly decided as Hal’s own character trumped the fear he was deeply damaged by the loss of parents he barely remembered. Her Hal was a natural scholar, a thinker who would find a comfortable corner of life somehow and settle into it with a genuine pleasure few outside his own world would ever understand. Worry as she might about Toby and his adventurous spirit and Josh’s sometimes wild imagination, she knew Hal would be happy as long as he was able to keep following clues and trails only he could read in some dusty old tome.
So now she could worry about Toby instead. He knew how it felt to have two loving parents and a comfortable life because he’d been eight years old when his whole world fell apart. Those first years were nothing like the past seven had been and now she thought she could rob him of the small security he had with Lady Wakebourne and all their other friends and fellow travellers? No, not even for Lord Mantaigne. There wasn’t a man on earth she could love enough to risk throwing away her brothers’ happiness for.
So, that was that. She would do whatever it took to keep these boys as happy and secure as they could be without a penny to their names but what she could earn or accept from a man who felt guilty about them for some reason. Once upon a time she had been too proud to accept charity, but could any woman who stared destitution in the face afford pride? It might be charity, but it would do. They would go to the Dower House of Spring Magna Manor House when it was ready if Lord Mantaigne offered it to them. The man had houses enough to quarter an army in and was hardly likely to miss one he admitted he’d forgotten about until he stumbled on it on one of his lone rides and asked who owned it.
If he intended to salve his conscience by allowing her and her friends to live in the Dower House,
