‘I was kept in that tower for several years by my wicked guardian, Master Trethayne. So, no, there are no ghosts up there I can assure you. I’d have been glad of their company, feral boy as I was back then.’
‘That’s what Poll said Jago was when Lady W. found him: a feral boy,’ Josh Trethayne said, and Tom could have kicked himself for saying too much about his past in front of this acute young gentleman, although there had to be rumours still flying about the area of shocking goings on up at the castle before Tom was taken away to be brought up by a very different guardian to the one he’d begun his career as an orphan with.
‘I dare say he and I would have got on well if we had met when I was young, then,’ Tom made himself say cheerfully as he tried to dismiss the past. ‘Right now I’m sharp set and filthy. Do you think your sister and Lady Wakebourne will mind if I eat in my dirt?’ he asked to divert the lad from what he’d revealed about his early life, lest he have nightmares of that long-lost boy shut up in the tower alone.
‘Yes, her ladyship says she has her standards, however low she’s fallen in life, and cleanliness costs only a bar of soap and some hot water, which is just as well since she can’t afford much more. We told her we’d be happy to save on the soap part to help out, but Poll insists it’s a price worth paying.’
‘Bad luck,’ Tom said sympathetically, recalling earnest arguments with Virginia on the same subject he’d been secretly relieved not to win when he looked back with a shudder on being filthy and on the brink of starvation at Dayspring Castle, before his life took an unexpected turn for the better with her arrival in it.
* * *
Polly stood up from stoking the fire in the communal room they’d made from the great parlour of long-ago lords of Dayspring Castle. It had been little more than a huge lumber room until they came, but now the oak-panelled walls and mix of ancient furniture gathered from other neglected chambers shone with beeswax.
Richly coloured cushions made even awkward old oak chairs comfortable enough to sit and doze in on a winter evening. The fact they were made from the good bits of brocade or velvet curtains too old or damaged to repair probably wouldn’t go down well with the owner of this faded splendour, but she really didn’t care. No doubt Lord Mantaigne would condemn them for making a home here and turn them out tomorrow anyway, but today they had more right to be here than he did. Given the neglect he’d inflicted on his splendid birthright, if there was any justice he’d have no rights here at all.
‘Ah, there you are,’ the man observed from the doorway and she turned to make some sarcastic comment on his acute powers of observation.
‘Heavens,’ she said lamely instead and felt her mouth fall open at the sight of a very different Lord Mantaigne to the man polite society fawned on like fools.
‘I believe “Lawks” was how your cook put it,’ he said, and drat the man, but his grin was pure charm, and suddenly she understood all that fawning after all.
‘Prue’s not my cook, she’s a friend,’ she argued, but there was no bite in her tone as she gazed at perhaps the dirtiest nobleman she’d ever laid eyes on.
He shrugged, and a clump of grey dust-covered cobweb fell from of his once-burnished curls and drifted softly to the threadbare but spotlessly clean Turkey carpet. ‘Whoever she is, she is a wonderful cook if the delicious smells coming from her kitchen are anything to go by.’
‘She is, and they are,’ Polly agreed lamely.
‘She has invited me to eat with you all, once I’ve dislodged the dust of ages from my person and can sit down to it like a civilised human being.’
‘That sounds like her,’ she said, still trying to enmesh her image of the wicked and sophisticated aristocrat she’d hated for so long with this rueful, sweaty and filthy man who seemed very ready to admit the joke was on him.
‘I offered to marry her, but she says she’s already spoken for,’ he added, and she refused to like him—yes, that was it, she simply refused to be charmed. He wasn’t going to subvert Paulina Trethayne with his easy, intimate smiles, or the glitter of mischief in those intensely blue eyes that invited her to laugh with him and bid goodbye to the wary distrust she wanted to keep between them like a shield.
‘It will take you until midnight to get yourself clean enough for that,’ she blurted out, and he laughed as if at a brilliant witticism. She felt it as if he’d reached inside her and jarred her whole being with that one rumble of masculine enjoyment. ‘And I refuse to wait here like a waxwork while you preen and primp and peacock yourself back into a state of suitable splendour and the rest of us go hungry, so you’d best hurry up.’
‘You thought me splendid before I acquired all this dirt then, Miss Trethayne?’ he asked with an ironic bow that lost some of its effect when a twig from some ancient bird’s nest fell on the carpet at his dusty feet and he had to stoop down even further to pick it up.
It would be silly to find it admirable in him to consider whoever had to keep this place clean. Of course she didn’t think he was anything of the kind and reinforced her disapproval with a glower that might be a little overdone. The sight of it certainly seemed to cheer the contrary man for some reason, and he clicked his heels in a mock-military salute, then stood as upright as a soldier on parade.
‘I can quite see why your brothers are terrified of your wrath, Miss Trethayne. You must set very high standards of cleanliness and good behaviour.’
‘They are not terrified of me,’ she told him with the feeling of having been caught kicking puppies, making her meet those blue, blue eyes of his with shock and reproach in her own before she remembered he was a master of manipulating those about him and glared full at him, since he was so determined to get her attention.
‘No? And they seem such well-behaved and sensible lads,’ he lied with a straight face.
Dote on them though she might, she had no illusions about any of her lively and headstrong brothers and nobody had ever accused them of being less than a handful, even when they were on their best behaviour.
‘You know very well they’re nothing of the sort,’ she said dourly.
How had he tricked her into saying any such thing within such a short time of his arrival? She would have sworn to any other outsider that her brothers were the best boys she had ever come across if they even tried to tell her the Trethayne brothers were a touch wild and ought to be confined to the care of a strict schoolmaster until they learned some manners. Now she was admitting they were a trio of noisy and argumentative urchins to her worst enemy and he was her worst enemy, wasn’t he?
‘I like them,’ he claimed, and that was just plain unfair of him.
‘So do I,’ she replied repressively and stared pointedly at the spider about to drop off his elbow onto Lady Wakebourne’s favourite chair. ‘If you don’t go away and take your livestock with you, there won’t be any dinner left for you to devour when you get back from restoring yourself to your usual state of dandified magnificence in an hour or two,’ she told him nastily, but this man brought out the worst in her and that was that.
‘Scared of spiders, Miss Trethayne?’
‘No, only marquises, my lord.’
‘Very sensible, you really wouldn’t want one of us in your hair,’ he said as lightly as if she hadn’t just shot a dart past
