you thought it.” He grinned at her.
“True,” she confessed ruefully, “and I apologise for it.”
“Then will you allow me the honour of escorting you home? It will be absolutely dark in the woods.”
“Oh, there is no need,” she protested politely. “I shall be perfectly safe. I am not afraid of the dark—it is not as if you have bears or Indians in England.”
“I insist,” he said and turned away momentarily to whistle to the spaniel.
“You insist?” Her brows lifted and so, for no reason, did her heart as he returned his attention to her. “Then I suppose I have no choice in the matter.”
“None,” he said, offering her his arm.
It was politeness, she told herself, as she put out her gloved hand and tentatively let her fingers rest upon the sleeve of his coat and they began to walk towards the cliff path, falling easily into step, nothing but ordinary politeness. There was no reason for her pulse to race, her heart to pound. No reason at all.
“No, Tess! Down!” His exclamation as they halted at the base of the cliff path came too late for her to avoid the spaniel’s enthusiastic greeting as it caught up with them and transferred a considerable amount of mud, water and pond weed from its coat and paws to the skirts of her black wool pelisse.
“I am so sorry—she’s still very young and gets rather out of hand,” he apologised. “Lie down, Tess!”
Tess shot off up the cliff path.
He muttered an imprecation under his breath and then turned to her. “I hope she has not done too much damage—I have a handkerchief somewhere.”
“It really doesn’t matter,” she said, laughing as she watched the spaniel turn and come back down the path again, so fast it turned a somersault at the bottom as it tried to stop at its master’s feet.
“Idiot dog!” He laughed, too, as Tess put her muzzle upon the toe of his boot and gazed up at him soulfully, the very picture of man’s loyal and obedient friend. “She was the runt of the litter and is terrified of guns. I should have knocked her upon the head at birth—still should, I suppose—”
“But you won’t,” she said with a certainty she did not stop to question.
“No.” He gave a half laugh. “As you have obviously perceived, a tender heart beats beneath this grim exterior.”
“I should not have called you grim,” she replied, giving him a brief sideways glance. “A little weathered, perhaps.”
“Thank you.” He inclined his head to her in a mocking bow. “Dare I allow myself to be flattered?”
“I do not think you have any need of my flattery. I suspect even the youngest son of an Earl receives more than enough.”
He laughed again. “That was definitely not complimentary, Miss Hilton, though I am afraid it was all too true. Have you always been so brutally honest with your friends?”
“Yes,” she said sweetly. “I find real friends always prefer honesty to pretence.”
He smiled and conceded her the victory with the slightest nod of his head. “I had better go first,” he said, gesturing to the rocky beginning of the cliff path, “then I can help you over the difficult places.”
“Thank you,” she acquiesced politely with a fleeting smile. She had climbed this path a hundred times without mishap and, in her childhood, rock faces as sheer as the one the water tumbled from, not to mention trees. Daniel had always got her to do the climbing when they had been looking for bird eggs—of the two of them, she’d had a better head for heights.
But that had been a different world, a different life, she thought, as he turned and held out his hands to her after scrambling over the first few boulders. English ladies were expected to be fragile, helpless creatures, and for once, as she put her hands into his and he smiled at her, she found she did not particularly mind furthering the illusion.
The path was steep enough to preclude much conversation and they climbed mostly in a companionable silence, with Tess padding quietly behind them.
He had been right. It was almost pitch black once they entered the woods. Out of old ingrained habit, she paused, listening and cataloguing the sounds in her mind and relaxing as she heard nothing but the natural chorus of the wood at night: the cooing of wood pigeons, the flutter and swoop of an owl, the squeal of a shrew and the rustle of leaves beneath Tess’s paws as she nosed around their feet, seeking a scent. It was only as she went to move forward again that she realised he had also halted and was listening.
“Sorry—” he turned his head to smile at her in the gloom “—I’ve never walked into a wood at night without stopping to listen since my troop was ambushed in Spain.”
“You were a soldier?” She was surprised. He was so unlike the army officers who dined with the Filmores from time to time.
“Briefly, in my misspent youth.” He shrugged as they walked on. “I did not particularly enjoy the experience. The Peninsular War was savage enough, but Waterloo—that was simply a slaughterhouse, and killed any remaining hankering to cover myself in military glory. I decided twenty was far too young to die and resigned my commission the moment we were sure Napoleon was beaten.”
“You were six years older than Jem is now,” she said flatly.
“I know.” The self-mocking tone left his voice. “And I wish to heaven there was something else I could do…I feel as if I have failed you.”
“No. No,” she protested, knowing she had been unfair. “At least you tried to do something for Jem, which is far more than I expected of a—”
“A worthless rake and a dandy?” he supplied wryly. “That is what you thought me at first glance, is it not?”
“At first glance, perhaps. But I could not count anyone who made the speech that you did to Parliament entirely worthless, Mr Lindsay.”
“Speech?” He looked at her blankly for a moment.
“The one defending the rights of the labouring poor.”
“Ah—” he stumbled suddenly upon a tree root “—that speech. There is something, perhaps, you should know—I am no radical, Miss Hilton. I sit on the Tory side.”
“Why?”
“Why?” He echoed her question in astonishment, as if he had never considered any other possibility. “Well, because my father did, and his before him, I suppose,” he said after a moment of silence.
“That’s the worst reason I have heard yet,” she said drily.
“Thank you,” he said with equal dryness.
She sighed. “Oh, well, I suppose it is not the label which matters, it is what you say. And you said all the things I should like to, except that you did it a great deal better than I ever could—”
“I doubt that. I suspect you would make a formidable advocate of any cause, Miss
