she said with a wry smile for his poor bruised face and the shadows even under his good eye from lack of proper sleep. ‘Poor Gideon,’ she added and surely it wasn’t quite right to feel such a rush of joy at the mere sight of the boyish smile she remembered from the old days in response?
‘Lucky Gideon,’ he corrected softly and the look he slanted her made it clear she was the reason he thought it was worth it.
She smiled back and let herself enjoy this odd journey through a luminous dawn. They were sitting on the box of what she still thought of as her aunt’s carriage. As he was driving the sturdy pair she refused to be shut inside a stuffy, swaying box on wheels on such a perfect morning. So the little kitchen maid was inside the coach in her stead, dressed in her Sunday best and feeling like a Queen of England, she assured Callie, and shook her head at an offer to sit in the fresh air, as well.
‘I’ve never rode in a real coach before, miss, I mean, my lady, and the missus would scold me something wicked if she caught me getting that wrong again, wouldn’t she?’ the girl said with a happy grin.
Callie smiled back in silent glee neither of them need tiptoe round her aunt’s notions of propriety ever again. Now she let herself feel the thrill of a new start life in the shape of Sir Gideon Laughraine as well as the fears she struggled with last night. His stray lady was about to be reborn as a potential aristocrat and apparently Biddy was going to scale the dizzy heights of lady’s maid without going through any of the stages in between.
‘She’s never going to fit anyone’s idea of a proper lady’s maid,’ Gideon warned softly as they moved on to the main road to Manydown and Biddy waved regally at a startled farm labourer about to go off to the fields for the day.
‘That’s why I engaged her,’ Callie admitted, the thought of a silently critical dresser who would sniff and disapprove of her new mistress making Biddy’s pleas not to leave her behind a good excuse not to engage one. ‘I couldn’t let her be turned into the world with nothing, now could I?’
‘Perhaps not, but we could still find her a place more fitted to her skills when we get to Raigne. Your personal maid will have to cope with a large collection of gowns and can the girl sew? She won’t know how to clean a riding habit or wash the ostrich plume fashionable females festoon their bonnets with. If all Biddy can do is wash pots and pare vegetables, she’ll be in the suds the first time she’s called on to do something less than straightforward to my lady’s wardrobe.’
‘No, she won’t, suds are what she’s escaping from. For one thing, I’m not a fashionable female. For another, she can sew perfectly well, because my aunt insisted all the maids she employed could do so to save a sewing woman’s wages. I’m sure someone at Raigne will be glad to show her how to keep my habits clean and what to do about anything I manage to spill on my favourite gown and she might as well learn to be a lady’s maid at the same time I find out how to be a lady.’
‘You are already a lady. Let’s not have that old argument again.’
‘Very well, we’ll leave it for another day,’ Callie conceded with a look about her at the early morning sunshine and another fine day. ‘Where do you think my aunt has gone?’ she asked after they had driven through Manydown to startled faces as the early risers saw Mrs Grisham’s niece on the box and Biddy waving regally at them from inside the carriage as if practising for her coronation.
‘How would I know?’ Gideon said as he got the feel of the pair and set them bowling along the better road to the main highway that would lead them to the other side of the county and Raigne, hopefully before the sun could climb too high and make the journey wearisome.
‘You seem to find out what makes a person tick a little too easily nowadays,’ she replied, feeling the tug of intimacy as she adapted to the movements of his strong body brushing hers as he expertly flicked his whip or softly reassured the more skittish of the two glossy chestnut horses he was driving to an inch.
‘I don’t much care where she is or want to understand her,’ he said shortly.
She sensed something held back and turned to give him a very wifely look. ‘Now I’m wondering why I don’t believe you,’ she said as he tried to be inscrutable again.
‘So am I.’
‘Maybe I know you too well?’ She paused and took another look at the blank expression he was trying to fix as he concentrated on his horses as if they were far more restless than they appeared on a fine morning with a smooth road ahead. ‘You let her go, didn’t you?’ she said as the unlikelihood of such a daring escape dawned at last.
‘Oh, yes,’ he said with a smile that would have looked just right on a fox picking hens’ feathers out of his strong white teeth of a morning. ‘First we had a little talk and then I suggested she leave before I called the Runners.’
‘I hope you’re not going to tell me my aunt has taken to highway robbery?’
‘No, but your unlikely maid is probably resting her feet on an extra box I slipped into the carriage before we set out.’
‘She had my parents’ letters as well as ours, didn’t she?’ she said, and it was as much a statement as a question. He’d seen the echo of their own tale in her parents’ ill-fated love affair and known exactly what to look for. Apparently the wild young man she married had grown up to be a clever and subtle man.
‘Yes. It’s all about power, Callie, a need to control those around her without them realising she’s doing it,’ he said wearily and she felt cold even on this sunny July morning at the idea she’d been dancing to Seraphina Bartle’s tune all her life without realising it.
‘Why extort money from anyone else, though? She already had what I earned for her with our pupils as well as what you sent me to live well on while you struggled.’
‘Only at first, I do very well now.’
‘Stop trying to divert me with your tale of rags to riches, Husband, and kindly answer my questions, you’re not in a courtroom now.’
‘I feel as if I might be,’ he teased her, then sobered. ‘Last night she confessed Bartle ran through any money they had and left her a mountain of debts. Whatever the details of his death might be, she didn’t deserve that.’
‘Now who’s making excuses for her?’
‘I’m trying to understand. She always knew right from wrong, your grandfather would see to that, so why lie and cheat and take such pleasure in making her family unhappy?’
‘Because she married Mr Bartle, perhaps? Maybe a cow looked at my grandmother the wrong way when she was carrying her and that did it? Who knows? She lied and stole and did her best to ruin our marriage and nearly wrecked my mother’s life beforehand.’
‘She didn’t need to do much to part us, did she? I did most of it for her before you even got back to King’s Raigne and fell into her clutches again,’ he argued bleakly.
‘Don’t, Gideon,’ she protested, fighting tears at the desolation in his voice.
‘Very well then, let’s talk of the weather, shall we?’ he said bitterly. ‘I’m heartily sick of your aunt as a subject of conversation and we might as well find something neutral to while away the tedium of our journey.’
‘Of course, it seems set fair to last out the week, don’t you think?’
