asleep as I seem, Miss Smith. With the number of stitches in my arm, I am often pressed to do more than doze.’
‘You have the habit of deceit, Captain,’ she told him disapprovingly.
‘True, but perhaps we had best not to examine that trait too deeply, since you share it. At first I was sparing the great oaf worry by staying still, then I nearly ended up blushing like a schoolgirl.’
‘Serves you right.’
‘True, but I was glad you finally remembered my presence.’
‘I recalled my own good sense, you had nothing to do with it.’
‘I’m suitably mortified, but nevertheless you did well. Marcus decided long ago to have nothing to do with love. I doubt anything less would seem worthy of throwing your bonnet over the windmill.’
‘I realised that for myself.’
‘Yet it can’t hurt to say he’s as stony hearted as I’m thought to be.’
‘No, Captain, the gossips are wrong.’
‘That they’re not. Marcus is quieter than me, but he’s still dangerous, and your sex has a way of yearning for the unattainable.’
‘That’s not what I meant,’ she said softly and reached a gentle hand up to touch his still-thin cheek. ‘Lord Strensham is essentially cold, but I think you, Captain, are far from it.’
He looked uncomfortable, more used to brazening out misdeeds than fielding praise. ‘I leave at the end of the week to continue my recovery at my grandmother’s house in Bath,’ he said with every sign of revulsion.
‘Poor Captain Prestbury.’
‘Oh, confound it, why not call me Nick?’
‘Because I’m the under-housemaid.’
‘My friends call me by my given name.’
‘Thank you, Nick, but when we meet again, please forget you ever set eyes on me?’
‘Aye, but a letter to the Dowager Lady Prestbury in Sydney Place will find me.’
‘I will remember,’ she said softly and with a gesture of farewell, went to find the solitude she needed. If only she had a brother like Nick Prestbury, how different her life would be.
At the end of April the Darraine family left for the capital to enjoy the Season and to join the peace celebrations. Although most of the senior staff went too, the rest stayed at Rosecombe. Which could hardly be described as a holiday, Thea thought one sunny day at the end of June, considering the housekeeper would pounce on any neglect of their duties. Yet, if she made up her work in double time, a few minutes could be stolen from the day.
‘You’ll get caught one day you will,’ Carrie, the head housemaid, informed her cheerfully when she came upon her second lieutenant illicitly reading one of Sir Edward’s beloved books.
‘Caught dusting the library? That’s what we maids do.’
‘The rest of us don’t read the books while we’re dusting them, but you’d best be more careful, now.’
‘Why?’ Thea got on very well with the cheerful country girl and doubted her warning was a threat to reveal her secret.
‘Family’s coming home, and bringing guests with them.’
‘I thought they were off to Brighton.’
‘So did I, but we was both wrong. His lordship and the Captain will join them later, or so Mrs Meldon says, and she wants their rooms got ready before we start on all the others, just in case one of them takes it into his head to arrive before we’re ready.’
Thea’s heart thumped at the mere mention of the new Viscount Strensham, but she told herself not to be a fool. He had made his feelings, or lack of them, clear last time they met. He was just another stranger who would fill her days with work as Lady Lydia had promised.
‘I’d best hurry up in here, then,’ she said calmly and put her book back.
‘I’ll help, then we’ll find Jane and make a start. Let’s hope the missus don’t expect us to do it all ourselves, or we’ll be dead on our feet.’
Plenty of help was forthcoming, but Thea was soon wondering if they might not all drop from exhaustion, just running about satisfying the guests’ constant demands. Lady Lydia and Sir Edward Darraine cultivated a very odd set of friends. A bullying and humourless heiress whose father made his money in the cloth trade in the north; a lively widow with a merry eye; and a very young lady so shy she hardly spoke. They didn’t seem to have much in common and would surely have been better entertained by the protracted victory celebrations the newspapers were full of.
Miss Rashton’s demands and constant complaints about country servants and their uncouth ways was wearing everyone’s nerves to tatters. Thea kept out of her way, and tried to consider the wretched female her punishment for once also being a demanding and inconsiderate miss. Then the maids were ordered to help in the hall one day and the reason for the lady’s presence became clear as glass.
She saw a tall and immaculately dressed gentleman climbing down from a hired carriage, just as an artlessly disordered Miss Rashton came drifting down the stairs as if by pure chance. For a moment Thea’s ears buzzed as if she might actually be in danger of fainting, but she refused to give him the satisfaction. Not by one look or gesture would she reveal she even remembered him, she told herself, and folded her hands behind her back where nobody could see them shaking.
‘Oh, the dear viscount is here,’ the chief heiress breathed in the softest tones anyone at the Park had heard since she arrived. ‘Now we shall be merry again,’ she added, with an eager sparkle in her hard eyes, and the unscrupulous rogue greeted her with a wicked smile and a bow that would have done credit to a Bond Street Beau.
‘Miss Rashton, and Mrs Fall,’ Lord Strensham said, bowing just as gracefully and smiling just as wolfishly at the widow, who emerged from the music room where she had probably been hiding from the tone-deaf Miss Rashton. ‘London was a veritable desert without you, ladies, so I escaped Prinny’s celebrations as soon as I could.’
‘Indeed, it must be nigh unbearable by now, what with all the noise and heat and that vulgar crowd turning out to see the Sovereigns off,’ Miss Rashton said rather wistfully.
‘Yes, you would not have liked it at all,’ he returned, and Thea wondered if she was the only one who detected mockery in his grey eyes.
He was here to marry one of these creatures. At the moment she fervently hoped that he saddled himself with Miss Rashton for the rest of their days. Such a cynical alliance would suit him perfectly.
She stood, head bowed and waiting for orders, trying to pretend the man standing so close and so remote meant nothing to her. Her battle-worn major had become the sort of fastidious aristocrat who might turn a menial into a rabid Jacobin. This cynical rake really didn’t appeal to her at all. Or at least not very much.
His broad shoulders were encased in a coat of dark blue superfine that fitted him without a wrinkle, his cravat was perfection and his linen
