to tell herself not yet, but soon it would have to be now.
* * *
‘Ah, there you are, my dear,’ Lady Wakebourne said absently when she slipped into the dining parlour at the last moment before Prue would tell her she was too late and must make do with whatever she could forage in the kitchen.
‘I was too dirty to sit down to dinner without a bath,’ she told whoever might be interested.
‘You shouldn’t be slaving in the fields like a peasant girl,’ Prue said sternly, and her sister nodded a solemn agreement.
Toby frowned at the last of his rabbit stew as if it suddenly tasted less savoury and shot her a worried look. ‘We should help you instead of idling at the Vicarage all day,’ he told her as if he’d suddenly grown up and become the man of the household.
‘I’m not idle,’ Henry objected, ‘I work hard.’
‘No, but you’re a natural scholar, Hal, and love your dusty old books. I don’t see much point aping the little gentleman much longer and pretending I have the least bent for learning, though, because I haven’t.’
‘I doubt any of us struggled to provide you with an education in order for you to throw it in our faces, my lad,’ Lady Wakebourne chided with a glare at her own protégés that Jago returned with a shrug that said he wasn’t going to complain about a lack of hard work after his years spent cleaning chimneys from dawn until dusk.
‘I don’t think any of us could describe you as little gentlemen without being accused of stretching the truth mightily,’ Lord Mantaigne intervened before Toby could dash out and sign on as cabin boy on the nearest merchant ship and his littlest brother as powder-monkey to a man o’war.
‘I promised your mother I would raise you as gentlemen, so you’re not getting out of your lessons that easily, young man. And you promised her you would do as I said until you were one and twenty. By my reckoning, I have another six years of blissful obedience to my every whim to look forward to,’ Polly said with a steady look for her eldest brother, then a wistful glance at her dinner.
She had worked up a mighty appetite at her labours and was very sharp set, but her brothers took precedence over everything else until she’d convinced them there was no point setting out to see the world before it had an idea they were coming.
‘Let your sister eat in peace, Tobias,’ his lordship said quietly, and Polly waited for a protest, but none came.
Toby held his new friend’s eyes with a steady challenge for a long moment, then seemed to accept some unspoken reassurance Lord Mantaigne was giving him and grinned like the schoolboy he still was.
‘Can I have some more, then?’ he asked Prue, who pretended to be shocked by his huge appetite, as usual, then helped him to another plateful and muttered about growing boys who grew cheekier by the moment.
‘You know very well I’m your favourite,’ he replied with a grin, and Polly had to fight a smile, because he was quite right. Prue loved the way Toby enjoyed her food so openly and he also had the easy charm of generations of piratical Trethayne males to call on when he chose to use it.
‘You take no notice of him, young Henry,’ Prue said and piled another helping on Hal’s plate unasked.
He grinned and ploughed his way through it with nearly as fine an appetite as his elder brother, but he was more comfortable in his own shoes and accepted he was loved as easily as one of the mixed pack of dogs lying fast asleep in front of the fire seemed to do. Little Josh had worn himself out chasing about the countryside on some mischief and had already been packed off to bed before he went to sleep in his dinner. Polly took time to wonder at how different her brothers were. Each had a special place in her heart and she would lay down her life for them if she had to, but did she love them enough to lay pride aside and let Lord Mantaigne offer them some golden future she could not?
The hint of it was in the air, the promise of a different life for them all in his vague reference to a plan he and Lady Wakebourne had been hatching between them. She wondered at herself for not wanting to snatch hold of it with both hands. How would the boys feel in ten years’ time if they lived on a rich man’s charity? And how did Mr Peters feel about his lot in life now? She shot him a wary glance as she did her best to recall Claire’s teaching that real ladies took small bites and chewed their food to stop herself gulping Prue’s stew down as fast as she could before running out of the room to escape all these uncomfortable problems.
The answer was that Mr Peters seemed content enough to play second fiddle to his employer, most of the time. She frowned at the notion he also seemed braced for some long-expected burden to fall on his shoulders and that odd idea didn’t answer any of her questions. All Toby and Henry and Josh needed to do was make a path for themselves through life, though, and she hoped it would lead them to happiness and middling prosperity. They had an honourable name, but nobody would expect them to shoulder the heavy weight the head of a noble family had to bear.
She ate her fill and drank a little of the wine so long left to age or even spoil in my lord’s cellars and thought about that weight. The Marquis of Mantaigne carried such expectation, so many demands on those broad shoulders of his, so how could she let her brothers become one more? The long put-off notion of trying to get the head of her family to help her again surfaced. The mellow claret turned bitter on her tongue at the thought of asking the arrogant old man who’d looked down on her father for anything, after he’d thrown her and the boys out of his house as if they’d polluted it and ordered her never to come back. She gulped her wine so carelessly it went the wrong way and she demonstrated all too clearly why she’d never be any man’s conformable wife by spluttering and going red as a beetroot at the dining table.
‘Try to breathe slowly and evenly and you’ll soon be right as ninepence again,’ Lady Wakebourne urged comfortably as Polly did her best not to cough at the same time as she mentally pushed the imaginary Marchioness of Mantaigne out of the room and slammed the door in her smug face.
‘Tea, Miss Polly, that’s what you need,’ Prue said sagely and went off to make some before she could argue.
It would take a lot more than a cup of smuggled Pekoe to right the trouble that ailed her, Polly decided. She let Lady Wakebourne lead her from the room and sit her down in the slip of a room she’d christened her drawing room, as if she was still the prosperous squire’s daughter of her youth, though, and enjoyed being soothed and mothered for once. Tomorrow was soon enough to face the very adult problem she had been fighting not to admit she had since the moment her eyes first met Lord Mantaigne’s across one of the Dayspring stables.
‘What are you planning to do about them then, Mantaigne?’ Peters asked when he found Tom on the old outer walls watching the moon rise over the sea.
‘Schools for some, trades for others. Boys need to be busy and will get into trouble if they’re not occupied, whatever Lady Wakebourne thinks about turning her urchins into little gentlemen. The adults must decide what they want out of life for themselves, since I can’t do everything. There will be posts here if they want them, but not the sort of freedom they have had until I came back.’
‘For some that was only freedom to starve, but what of the ladies?’
‘Ah, yes, the ladies. Now they really are a conundrum.’
‘One
