What invitation? One glance at them had Tamsyn seething inwardly. They had invited him without telling her, for some nefarious reason of their own. They should have left the poor man to sleep. She eyed the poor man as he made his way slowly, but steadily, to the fireside and made his elegant bow to the aunts.
Predictably Aunt Izzy beamed at him and Aunt Rosie sent him a shrewd, slanting smile. ‘Do sit down, Mr Defoe. I can well appreciate your desire to leave your room. Tamsyn, dear, perhaps Mr Defoe would care for a glass of sherry or Madeira?’
‘Thank you, sherry would be very welcome.’
Tamsyn poured the rich brown wine into one of Aunt Izzy’s best glasses. At least their tableware would not disgrace them. The house was full of small treasures that Izzy treated with casual enjoyment. She was as likely to put wildflowers into the exquisite glasses as fine wine and, if one of the others protested, she would shrug and say, Oh, Papa let me take all sorts of things down here. I’m sure none of them are very valuable and I like to use nice objects.
Mr Defoe stood beside the wing chair, waiting until Tamsyn had completed her task. ‘Thank you.’ He took the glass, then when she perched on the sofa next to Izzy he sat down with grace, and, to an observant eye, some caution. She suspected his overstretched muscles were giving him hell and he was more exhausted than he would allow himself to show. His features were naturally fine cut, she guessed, but even allowing for that, she detected strain hidden by force of will.
‘Again, I have to ask you—who is dangerous? I apologise for my inadvertent eavesdropping, but having heard, I do not know how to ignore the fact that you seem to be in need of protection.’
In the silence that fell the three women eyed each other, then Tamsyn said, ‘A rogue dog chased some of our flock of Devon Longwools over the cliff.’
‘And moved a hurdle, I gather.’ He rotated the glass between his fingertips, his attention apparently on the wine. ‘A talented hound.’
He had sharp ears, or he had lingered on the stairs, listening. Probably both. ‘That must be coincidence and it is simply a sorry chapter of accidents,’ Tamsyn said. ‘Tell me, Mr Defoe, do you come from an agricultural area?’
‘I own some land,’ he conceded. The amusement in his eyes was, she supposed, for her heavy-handed attempt at steering the subject away from the sheep. ‘But I do not have sheep. Arable, cattle and horses in the south. This must be challenging country for agriculture, so close to the sea and the wild weather.’
‘Everyone mixes farming and fishing,’ Aunt Rosie said. ‘And we have land that is much more sheltered than the sheep pastures on top of the cliffs, so we keep some dairy cattle and grow our own wheat and hay.’ Aunt Izzy opened her mouth as though to bewail the burnt hayricks again, then closed her lips tight at the look from Rosie. ‘We own some of the fishing boats that operate out of Stib’s Landing, which is the next, much larger cove, just around Barbary Head to the south.’
‘A complex business, but no doubt you have a competent farm manager. I am often away, so I rely heavily on mine.’
‘Oh, no, dear Tamsyn does it all,’ Izzy said cheerfully. Tamsyn wondered why Rosie rolled her eyes at her—it was, after all, only the truth.
‘I have to earn my keep,’ she said with a smile. ‘And I like to keep busy. Are you travelling for pleasure, Mr Defoe? We are beginning to quite rival the south-coast resorts in this part of the world. Ilfracombe, for example, is positively fashionable.’
‘Perfect for sea bathing,’ Izzy said vaguely, then blushed. ‘Oh, I didn’t mean...’
‘I am sure I would have done much better with a genteel bathing machine—I might have remembered to swim back when my time was up and not go ploughing off into the ocean while I thought of other things.’ He smiled, but there was a bitter twist to it.
‘Is that what you were doing? I did wonder, for the beach—if you can call it that—at Hartland Quay is hardly the kind of place you find people taking the saltwater cure.’ Not, that Mr Defoe needed curing of anything, Tamsyn considered. He looked as though he would be indecently healthy, once rested.
‘I was seized with an attack of acute boredom with the Great North Road, down which I was travelling, so, when I got to Newark, I turned south-west and just kept going, looking for somewhere completely wild and unspoilt.’
‘And then attempted to swim to America?’ What on earth prompted a man to strip off all his clothes, plunge into a cold sea and swim out so far that the current took him?
‘I needed the exercise and I wanted to clear my mind. I certainly achieved the first, if not the second.’ He stopped turning the glass between his fingers and took a long sip. ‘This is very fine wine, I commend you on your supplier.’
‘Probably smuggled,’ Rosie said, accepting the abrupt change of subject. ‘Things turn up on the doorstep. I suppose the correct thing to do is to knock a hole in the cask and drain it away, but that seems a wanton waste and one can hardly turn up at the excise office to pay duty without very awkward questions being asked.’
‘There is much smuggling hereabouts?’ Mr Defoe took another appreciative sip.
‘It is the other main source of income,’ Izzy, incorrigibly chatty and enthusiastic, confided. ‘And of course dear Jory led the gang around here.’
‘Jory?’
‘My late husband,’ Tamsyn said it reluctantly.
‘Such a dear boy. I took him in when he was just a lad, he came from over the border in Cornwall, but his father found him...difficult and he ran away from home.’
‘Dear Isobel is a great collector of lost lambs,’ Rosie said drily.
‘Such as me.’ Even as she said it Tamsyn knew it sounded bitter and that had never been how she felt. She managed to lighten her voice as she added, ‘My mother was Aunt Isobel’s cousin and when she died when I was ten I came to live with her. Jory arrived the next year.’
‘How romantic. Childhood sweethearts.’ The word romantic emerged like a word barely understood in a foreign language.
‘I married my best friend,’ Tamsyn said stiffly. She was not going to elaborate on that one jot and have yet another person wonder why on earth she had married that scapegrace Jory Perowne when she could have had the eligible Franklin Holt, Viscount Chelford.
‘And speaking of marriage,’ Aunt Izzy said with her usual blithe disregard for atmosphere, ‘has your manservant notified your family of your whereabouts? Because, if not, the carrier’s wagon will be leaving the village at nine tomorrow morning and will take letters into the Barnstaple receiving office.’
‘Thank you, ma’am, but there is no one expecting my return. Now I have set Collins’s mind at rest, my conscience can be clear on that front.’
‘Excellent,’ Tamsyn said briskly. It was nothing of the kind. Either he had a wife he could leave in ignorance with impunity, or he did not have one, and she would very much like to know which it was. Not that she was going to explore why she was so curious. ‘Now, tell me, Mr Defoe, are you able to eat rabbit? I do hope you do not despise it, for we have a glut of the little menaces and I feel certain it will feature in tonight’s dinner.’
