would say if I asked to share his.’
‘I wouldn’t sully my thoughts, let alone my ears, with your husband’s feelings about you being in such close contact with another member of his species on a day-to-day basis. But are you sure you need a female to deal with your correspondence and help with some of your duties? I shall hate it if my return home without much more than a penny to bless myself with put the idea of finding me pretend employment at Raigne into your head,’ Rowena made herself say. In truth the very idea of working with her dearest friend and living at Raigne was almost a dream come true. Almost, she reminded herself, as she tried not to meet the eyes of the man who could turn it into a nightmare.
‘Yes, I’m sure. I seem so taken up with this little devil the need for help has become a lot more urgent,’ her friend confessed with a protective hand on her still-flat belly that gave away volumes about her changed priorities.
‘Will you give me a few days to discuss the idea with Mama and Papa and Joanna? If I can persuade my darling sister to take her head out of the clouds long enough to think of aught but her beloved Mr Greenwood, of course.’
‘What a fine clergyman’s wife Joanna will be and she was always better behaved than either of us. I do hope Hester never falls in love with a serious man though, she’d drive him to drink,’ Callie observed with an indulgent glance at ten-year-old Hester Finch rolling over and over in the mown grass in the churchyard and doing her best to shove as much of it as possible down the necks of her mixed assortment of playmates.
‘She still has time to grow up and be a lady, more unlikely things have happened. We weren’t a lot better at the same age and look at you now,’ Rowena said. ‘Hes is in severe need of a lecture on the subject of not picking on much smaller opponents right now, though,’ she said and went off to supervise her little brothers and sisters after a despairing look from her mother and a promise to consider Callie and Gideon’s offer properly.
‘Imagine it was made by someone you don’t know half as well, then tell me truthfully you don’t want the post, Rowena,’ her friend called after her.
Rowena turned back to nod agreement, then shrugged ruefully as the squeals of her little sister’s victims became too overexcited for comfort. She needed to restore order before there were tears as well as giggles of high delight to disturb the serious-looking conversation her parents were having with Sir Gideon and Lord Laughraine.
‘Reverend Finch and his lady have a fine brood of children. I wonder how they fit them all in to even the most generous parsonage. At least the lovely Miss Joanna will be off their hands soon, since her banns were read today. Which only leaves them with Mrs Westhope to get wed again before the next young lady is of marriageable age, don’t you think?’ Henry Bowood said so casually James knew he was being twitted on his reluctant fascination with the even lovelier widow.
The man saw too much, always had. James resolved to be more wary and stop watching the widow Westhope from now on. ‘Aye, they appear to have had a long and fruitful marriage,’ he agreed easily, as if it was of no matter and neither was the retiring beauty who hid in churchyards and sometimes looked as if she knew too much about life outside this lovely rural sanctuary for comfort.
He knew that feeling too well and the Vicar of Raigne’s eldest daughter intrigued him. Not that she’d done a thing to catch or hold his interest in the entire month she’d been back in the Raigne villages, he forced himself to acknowledge. He reluctantly turned his attention from the cavorting children and surprisingly indulgent referee to his fellow guest.
‘Jealous?’ he asked cynically, raising one eyebrow to add emphasis to the question and hoping the spymaster’s son would be diverted.
‘If I ever felt the want of a family, conveying two of your mixed bag of brats across the Channel and taking them to their new foster parents would have cured me very rapidly,’ Bowood countered wryly.
Aye, James decided, it was high time he forgot golden-haired enchantresses with cobalt-blue eyes and all the possibilities they would never explore together and concentrated on the true facts of his life. ‘I can’t thank you enough for doing that for me, Harry. I could have endangered them now Fouché knows I’m not a simple merchant. You’re the only other man skilled and wily enough to get them into cleaner hands than mine and safe at last.’
‘You still don’t trust me with the location of Hebe’s brat, though. The other two you picked out of the gutters once their parents met their end could do with being part of a family,’ Bowood said stiffly.
‘Better you don’t know, considering the lengths the head of Bonaparte’s police will go to in order to break the spy ring he’s been gleefully taking apart since he got parts of it out of Hebe La Courte before her jailers went too far and killed her. If he has Hebe’s child, every single one of us will be at his mercy and he knows it.’
‘Not all of us are as soft-hearted as you, James,’ Bowood said.
This was no time to feel as if a cold hand had been laid on the back of his neck, James told himself, even as he wondered how ruthless Harry Bowood would be if need arose. The happy shouts of children and the joyous song of a robin in a nearby tree faded away and he frowned at the terrible memory of his last botched mission to Paris. Even now he didn’t know why he had had such a strong feeling he must go there and find out for himself what was wrong. The awful sight of his one-time lover’s twisted and mangled body, cast into the darkest alley at the dark heart of the old city when her interrogators went too far extracting her secrets, made him shudder in the mellow sunlight of an English Sunday. Lucky Hebe’s child was not yet three years old and would probably forget her lovely, reckless mother in time.
‘That’s not softness, but guilt,’ he confessed bleakly.
‘You take responsibility for the orphans of your smoky trade and call it guilt?’ Bowood said rather less cautiously than usual. James’s turn to eye him sceptically and hope it would remind him to be quieter.
‘Why not? The good reverend would say I deserve to feel it after all I have done and not done in the cause of who knows what these last few years.’
‘Society is so wrong about you, James Winterley. You have the heart and soul of a monk, not an idle man of fashion.’
‘Do I now?’ James said, brooding over how a monk would feel about such locked-down mysteries as Mr Finch’s eldest daughter. Even less easy with the temptation to knock off her awful bonnet and run his hands through that heavy mass of gold hair until it curled down her back and softened her wary face than this particular idle man of fashion was, he suspected.
‘James, the horses have been standing too long,’ his brother called impatiently from the lychgate and James shrugged off all thoughts of shocking the Vicar of Raigne’s daughter to her buttoned-up core.
‘I could walk, if I really had to, Big Brother,’ he drawled as annoyingly as he could manage, because it hurt to feel the estrangement between them strong as ever on such a fine and family-intimate day.
‘No doubt you can, but the question is what you’d do if you ever got those spotless Hessians of yours mired with a speck of dust or, heaven forbid, a scratch?’
‘Oh, give them to my valet, of course. I couldn’t possibly wear them again after that,’ James replied with a weary sigh, as if the depleted contents of his wardrobe troubled him far more than his brother’s
