wood and iron grid creaked upwards.
Now, faced with vast double oak doors studded with sufficient metal knobs to repel a charging elephant, Jack felt both amusement and patience slide away. ‘I should have brought siege engines, obviously. If Mistress—Mistress, if you please!—Madelyn Aylmer wants me then she can open her confounded gates because I am not going to knock. I did not drag down to Kent in the middle of the Newmarket July race meeting to play games.’ He clicked his tongue at Altair, who stepped on to the bridge, pecked at the sudden hollow note under his hooves, then walked on. Finally, the great doors opened.
The shadows were deep as Jack rode through the high archway, the sunlight blinding in the courtyard beyond a second opening. Here he was in the killing ground, where attackers could be penned in and assaulted on all sides from above, and he felt a prickle of awareness run down his spine as he rode towards the light. Someone was watching him. Jack circled the horse and looked up and back to a window high in the wall, making no attempt to disguise his scrutiny. A flicker of white, the pale oval of a face, the flash of spun gold and the watcher was gone.
Serve her right if I keep going right back where I came from.
But this was a commission, which meant money, and at least Mistress Aylmer hadn’t expected him to dress up in medieval clothes for this meeting. Pride was all very well, but it was a hollow coin that bought neither bread nor horseshoes. Jack turned Altair back and rode into the courtyard where, finally, someone had come out to meet him.
It was a surprise that the servants were not dressed in tights and tabards, although the leather jerkin and breeches of the groom who took Altair’s reins and led him away had a timeless look to them and the black-coated individual who came forward could have come from any period in the past hundred years.
‘My—’
‘Mr Jack Ransome to see Miss Aylmer, by appointment.’
‘Mistress Madelyn will receive you in the Great Hall,’ the man responded with the same emphasis Jack had used and without a flicker of either amusement or annoyance. ‘This way, sir.’
Jack followed up stone steps, along passages hung with tapestries that glowed as bright, surely, as the day they had been made. Which was probably within the last twenty years, he reminded himself with a flash of cynicism. He suspected that appearances were all in this fantasy world.
The butler, if that was who he was, threw open double doors—more studded oak, of course—and stood aside for Jack to enter. They closed behind him with a dull thud.
The Great Hall was well named. Walter Scott would love it, Jack reflected. All it needed was a bearded bard in one corner reciting The Lay of the Last Minstrel. He preferred something with fewer draughts and more soft furnishings himself. The roof was a hammer-beam construction and he counted two, no, three fireplaces of the ox-roasting variety, sighed at the sight of a number of suits of armour and walked on past more tapestries.
At least there are no harps and minstrels…
At the far end was a long oak table that looked as though it had been built to support the ox once it had been roasted. On it was a carved wooden coffer. And there, standing behind the coffer, was a tall, slender figure in blue. The light from a high window caught golden sparks from her hair—the watcher at the gate, he guessed.
Jack walked towards his new client, boot heels striking on stone flags, the rushes that were strewn over the floor rustling as he went. The place must be an ice house in the winter, even with all the fires alight—and most of the heat would go straight up the chimneys. The local coal merchants must be rubbing their hands with joy.
Presumably Miss Aylmer thought to put him at a disadvantage by making him walk towards her for this distance. Jack kept a straight face and an easy pace and only produced a social smile when he was within six feet of the table. Strangely, now he was inside and had sight of his client, he felt his irritation increase.
Not that the woman in front of him was unpleasing to the eye, even if her appearance was decidedly unusual. She was wearing a gown of deep blue in some fine draped fabric, caught in under the bust with tightly intricate pleating at the front. The long sleeves belled out over her hands to the knuckles where the hems were embroidered with delicate floral work that matched the band beneath her breasts.
Gowns might be worn with a high waistline now, but this was quite definitely not a modern style. Nor would any woman over the age of fifteen wear her hair loose around her shoulders, and Miss Aylmer must be in her early twenties. The straight fall of pale gold was caught back with combs but otherwise unconfined, signalling, he assumed, her virginity. Some men might see that as a challenge, others as an affectation. Jack told himself to withhold judgement. The woman in front of him was, after all, about to offer him employment and mildly exasperated incomprehension was no reason to turn it down. He could always do with money.
‘Miss Aylmer.’
‘Lord Dersington.’ She did not smile or offer her hand. Her eyes were the blue-grey of a winter river in her pale face.
Jack found himself oddly short of breath. She was not pretty, or beautiful, but she had something…something he could not put a name to. An ethereal quality, a cool serenity as though she was looking through glass into another world. He thought of stone carvings of female saints he had seen in cathedrals. She had the same rather long nose and oval face and those eyes that looked tranquilly on the horrors of the world of sinners. Plain by modern standards, yet somehow lovely and utterly remote.
‘Will you not take a seat?’
He did not call himself by his title, Madelyn knew that, but it was important to see how he took aggravation. Well, it seemed, on the surface at least. She folded her hands demurely in front of her and willed them not to shake. ‘My lord—’
‘Jack Ransome,’ said the Fifth Earl of Dersington, perfectly pleasantly, as he pulled out a chair and waited for her to sit before he took it, three feet away across the board. ‘Simply Mr Ransome.’ He put his hat and gloves on the table and ran one hand through ruffled hair the colour of the ancient oak panelling in the castle’s dining room.
‘Why do you not use your title, sir?’
‘Because, as I am sure you are aware—unless you made no enquiries about me at all, which I cannot believe—I have neither lands, nor seat. What is an earl without land?’ He asked the question as though they were debating an academic point, not something so personal to him. But the blue eyes were unamused.
‘A landless earl is still an earl.’ It felt like pushing a chess piece forward. How would he respond?
‘The entire raison d’être of earls, and of all the rest of the aristocracy, was to support the Crown, to maintain retainers so they could put men in the field to fight. Of recent years the role has been one of governance and of economics. Men of title sit in the House of Lords to assist in the government and they contribute to the wealth of the country by the stewardship of its lands. I have no lands and therefore no retainers and no wealth. Therefore no power and, logically, no function as an aristocrat.’
‘You could still sit in the House of Lords,’ Madelyn pointed out, even more curious now she had heard the explanation from his own lips. They were firm lips, framing a mouth that did not seem designed for hesitation.
‘I
