over and the country is trying to pull itself together.’
‘Not while that odious man Oliver Cromwell is in charge. I must ask you to be plain, sir, and explain to me why I should find a Roundhead in my home treating it as if it were his own. Or do you prefer prevarication to plain speaking?’
‘No,’ Francis said slowly. ‘I always make a point of speaking plainly.’
‘Then why have you not left with your friends? Where will you stay?’
‘Right here. In this house.’
‘Oh, no, I think not,’ Jane said, a boulder settling where her heart had been, disquiet dwelling where just a short while before there had been happiness and joy.
‘No?’
‘No.’
‘Why should I go anywhere when this is my home? The house and estate belong to me now. I purchased it fair and square.’
Jane stared at him in instinctive fear. ‘But—how can it? You lie.’
‘I do not.’
For a long moment she did not move. She was shocked, and as she sank on to the edge of the settle, clutching its arm, an onlooker might have supposed she had died. Surely it could not be true. She had heard of such happenings, of course, of properties belonging to Royalists being sequestered, but for it to happen to her—to have Bilborough taken from her! She was too shocked to weep and this man’s careless indifference to her plight brought her to her feet, and the ill-judged words sprang to her tongue almost without conscious thought.
‘How dare you! How dare you be so callous, so thoughtless at what your purchase of Bilborough would do to me, the owner of this house.’
‘Not any longer,’ he replied bluntly. ‘Forgive me, Mistress Lucas, but I did not know you—not that it would have made any difference.’
To Jane his reply was insultingly flippant and she felt the bite of his mockery. She had been so oppressed living in Jacob Atkins’s house these past four years that her temper had been subdued. But now, for the time being, those fears began to fade, for she had greater problems at hand. Tired of being at the mercy of Jacob Atkins for so long, she had not escaped his tyranny to find herself at the mercy of another, and she would do whatever it took to claim back what was rightfully hers. As she rose and confronted the Roundhead once more, she felt a deep and abiding anger.
Francis saw the young woman’s face turn white and the slender fingers clench on the riding whip they held, and knew a fraction of a second before she raised her hand what she would do and raised his own to avoid the blow, trapping hers easily and twisting it up behind her back, knocking the whip from her grasp and sending it clattering to the floor. His arms were a cage holding her against him.
Jane could feel the heat of him, the hard-muscled strength of him as his eyes looked mercilessly down into hers. Almost immediately his hands released her arm and closed over her shoulders, thrusting her away. Suddenly and unexpectedly he laughed.
‘You appear to be remarkably quick with your hands, Mistress Lucas. I can see I must not underestimate you. You might well have been a match for my fellow soldiers. So much for the popular conception of gently bred young ladies being raised like tender plants given to swooning and the vapours.’
The bright colour flamed in Jane’s cheeks once more and she bent and retrieved her whip, trying to ignore the pain in her wrist. ‘If I am angry, sir, it is because I suddenly find my home, which has belonged to the Lucas family for generations, has been stolen.’ She was also feeling increasingly unwell. Her headache was definitely getting worse and she was so hot and thirsty.
He laughed again in the face of her anger. ‘Of course, I should be delighted to have you remain as my guest—until you have found somewhere else to go. Do you have relatives hereabouts?’
Jane was dumbstruck. And so it was that she looked at the Roundhead Colonel with new eyes. And because it happened so unexpectedly, leaving no time to prepare herself, she experienced a sudden, terrible sense of loss and loneliness so that, for a moment, she found she could not speak. As she went on looking at him in disbelief, almost unseeing, she felt her heart gradually begin to pound, and all the tensions she had been trying so hard to control building up inside her until they came together in a tight knot at the base of her throat. She’d had moments of dejection before, but they had never been so serious. This was a bitter blow.
Chapter Two
It took Jane a moment to find her voice and say, ‘No, I do not. I do not understand you. You talk in riddles.’
Despite her haughty stance, Francis saw that her dark eyes, which moments before had been hurling scornful daggers at him, were now glittering with unshed tears. Somehow he found himself unable to move. She looked so unutterably sad—was that the word?—as though she had a troubled mind and he knew that his dogs sensed it by the way they looked at her with soulful eyes.
‘No, Mistress Lucas,’ he said on a gentler note. ‘It is you who is lacking in understanding.’
‘I don’t think so,’ she answered, feeling a sudden urge to hurt him as much as she was hurting. ‘Who are you, Colonel Russell? Please explain to me how this house can be yours? Where do you come from?’
‘From Cambridge.’
‘Really. I know Cambridge. Your name is familiar. As I recall there was a family by that name. They were farriers, I believe.’
His expression tightened. ‘You have a good memory, Mistress Lucas. You are right. My family dealt in horses.’
‘So, you took advantage of the upheaval of the war to take for yourself the house of a Royalist gentleman. You are nothing but an upstart, the son of a farrier, a man of exceedingly humble birth,’ she uttered scornfully. ‘You may be deserving with your newly acquired status, Colonel, but you are undeserving of such a prize as this. People of such low quality are unfit to inhabit such a house as Bilborough.’
Anger flared in his eyes at the intended insult. Ordinarily Francis had little difficulty in sustaining the air of cold detachment that was at once his most valuable defence in his dealings with his fellow men. He had had enough practice, but he had learned very soon that the cruel, avaricious world of war equated civility with weakness. And now the regenerated son of a horse breeder was looking forwards to teaching the arrogant and headstrong daughter of a Royalist nobleman a lesson or two.
‘I have every right. The Bilborough estate and rents were confiscated,’ he stated, his tone carrying more hidden steel than a rapier.
‘I had no knowledge of that,’ Jane replied, thinking that Gwen must have known and kept it from her.
‘That was not my concern at the time. But did it not occur to you that any estate known to support the King would be at risk? You left the house unattended.’
‘I did not—or perhaps I should say my stepmother did no such thing. When my father was killed she closed the house—indeed, there were those in Avery, those who supported Parliament who far outnumbered the Royalists, who were glad to see the back of us.’
‘There
