Debt of Honor (8 page)

The girl stared at her expectantly, so Letitia pushed Arthur Young’s book and the ledgers to the side. “Here on the desk, if you please.”

The maid deposited the tray, curtsied and left the room, closing the door quietly behind her.

Letitia sniffed. The delicious smell of smoked ham, fruits and freshly baked bread made her stomach give a little gurgle of appreciation. She plucked the largest strawberry from the cook’s artful arrangement and took a big bite. Sweet juice rolled over her tongue. She popped the rest of the strawberry into her mouth, then followed with a few paper-thin slices of ham. It was easy to keep a good table with a cook like her husband’s. And that bread. Even her father’s French master never came close to such perfection.

Letitia poured herself a glass of wine from the small carafe Slater had placed on the tray. Without water, it tasted stronger than what she was used to, but it was really good. She must thank Slater for his thoughtfulness.

After another slice of bread, she took a halved peach, no doubt plucked from Sir Percival’s hothouse, and set out for a leisurely stroll along the shelves while eating the delicious fruit. The perusal of titles on the book spines confirmed her suspicion. Her husband’s library was a shrine to agriculture. She never imagined there could be so many books on this subject and in one place.

But at the other end of the room, she found an excellent choice of literature. All major English authors with whom she was familiar. And even some foreign writers and poets of recent fame. No doubt Sarah’s doing.

Her fingers skimmed over the spines on one of the shelves until they stopped on a slim volume with Schiller’s name on it. She pulled it out and read the title. A play she didn’t know. The long, plump sofa was right behind her, and Letitia sank into its overstuffed cushion, open book in one hand.

The rain still pelted the windows, and the darkness of the day did not make reading easy. She could light the candles, but getting up seemed like an enormous effort. With the toes of each foot, she slid off her slippers and shifted to stretch her legs on the seat. Leaning comfortably against the sofa’s back, Letitia burrowed her feet under another pillow, rested her head on one hand and returned to reading, but soon her head began to swim. The pillow was so soft and warm…

Clean, shaven and in dry clothes, Percy ran lightly down the stairs and let himself into his favorite room.

The hot bath had taken the chill from his body, but a fire would make the library more pleasant on such a gloomy day. He was about to reach for the tinderbox when he noticed the disarray on his desk.

Someone had piled everything to one side to make room for a tray—and someone had eaten almost half of what was on it, not to mention drunk the wine. Apparently, Slater was aging more quickly than Percy had thought. The butler had never shown poor judgment in the choice of servants, but
this
was on the outside of acceptable.

Percy picked up the tray and turned around in search of a table with some free surface on which to deposit the ravaged meal. His stomach rumbled in protest at having to wait for its replacement.

Just then, he caught a glimpse of something pinkish on one of the sofas, a foreign object that, he was sure, had not been there yesterday. A quick perusal ended in astonishment.

The pinkish object was his wife.

He quietly put the tray back on the desk, his heart racing at this discovery.

Letitia was fast asleep, one arm under the pillow in which she’d burrowed her face, her hand hanging limply over the edge of the sofa, palm up. Her other hand rested on a small volume, still opened to the page she had been reading. Her feet were buried under another pillow. A few shorter strands of hair had escaped the loosened knot and fallen on her cheek and down her throat. Her breathing was deep and slow.

She looked so fragile and beautiful at the same time, so at peace with her surroundings, and—he searched for the right word—so…right. Yes, she looked right on his sofa in his library. As if she belonged here.

Belonged here? If she did, it was only as the inconvenient part of his marriage of convenience, nothing more.

Carefully, Percy tiptoed over to the sofa, giving in to the sudden craving to peek at her face, and squatted by the armrest. Letitia’s cheek was rosy from sleep, and long, golden lashes gave her face a nearly angelic aura. Her slightly parted lips beckoned. All he needed to do was lean a bit forward and touch them with his own.

Wincing, Percy shifted his gaze away from her mouth. But, damn him, it slid to her breasts lifting the fabric of the dress with each breath, to the ivory skin of her shoulders and to the long, smooth column of her throat. He swallowed. Desire swirled through him out of nowhere, like a potent blast of wind.

Getting up hastily, he warned himself that giving in to temptation was absolutely out of question. What he should do now was to wake her up, send her on her way and get to work.

Instead, Percy tiptoed to the two smaller sofas and retrieved a blanket that until now had spent a useless life thrown over an armrest. Back by Letitia’s side, he carefully spread the blanket over her.

She murmured something under her breath and burrowed deeper into the pillows.

He felt a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth and bent to pull the book from under her palm before it fell to the floor. She moved her fingers and murmured something again, but did not wake.

Schiller. He recognized the slim volume, putting it on the table. The very one he had bought in London just before meeting Sarah for the first time. Then he’d tried to read it to her when she came here as his bride. Sarah hadn’t liked it.

She hadn’t liked coming to the library, either, and had kept her books in her room. It had surprised him after her death that most of them were about India. She’d never talked about India. She’d never talked much about anything except being unwell.

Life surely could deal one a surprising hand. The first two weeks of his marriage to Sarah were etched in his memory as days of nearly insane happiness. Gorgeous early summer days when everything around them had basked in sunshine just because she was here with him.

Then, after a fortnight, he had to return to London. Sarah refused to go. Later, he would always regret that he had not insisted on taking her along. Those two weeks of separation changed her somehow.

Over the years, she grew increasingly distant and cold. He had spent countless nights since her death, lying awake and trying to understand what he had done to contribute to their falling apart and the terrible end that followed. If only they had had children, none of this would have happened.

Percy glanced at Letitia again. A week had passed, and he had done nothing more than touch her hand when required by etiquette—if he excluded her little misstep on the stairs. Even if she could be trusted, he would be wise to keep his distance. He did not want to be again in the same place where trusting Sarah had led him in the end.

Percy returned to the desk, sank into the chair, poured more wine into an almost-empty glass and opened one of the ledgers.

Soon his attention was focused on the layout of crops for the next year as he marked the appropriate locations on a crude map of Wycombe Oaks land he had drawn for himself.

When some half an hour later, distracted by a calculation he was trying to complete in his head, Percy glanced again at the sofa, his absentminded gaze met a scrutinizing one of wide-open, green eyes.

Chapter Ten

Letitia awoke in a blissful comfort. The warmth and softness around her were so inviting she didn’t want to move just yet. Instead, she kept her eyes closed, hoping to fall asleep again.

A rustle of paper made her snap out of that nebulous state and gaze around.

A discomforting sense of suspension enveloped her when all she could see was an unfamiliar carpet surrounded by bookcases. Bookcases… She had come down to the library in search of her husband and then… Her gaze followed the pattern of the carpet all the way to the fireplace and landed on a pair of masculine legs under the desk. She shifted her gaze higher. Above the surface, Sir Percival’s head was bent over some papers, a quill bobbing in unison with the movement of his hand.

The fuzzy remnants of sleep retreated in an instant. How long had he been at his desk? Had he noticed her? She moved a hand and discovered where the warmth had come from. Reluctant gratitude spread, like the blanket’s warmth, through her heart.

Unsure what to do next, Letitia watched him engrossed in writing. Damp curls framed his face, his expression thoughtful. In the gloomy daylight, he appeared tired, but no less fascinating. How would it feel to run her fingers through that still-damp hair? Or to kiss his decisive mouth, now slightly pursed in concentration?

She shuddered with self-disapproval. Foolish musings. How could she even let such thoughts enter her head?

Just then, Sir Percival dipped his pen in the inkwell and glanced ahead, without focusing on anything in particular, clearly preoccupied with his thoughts. His absent gaze skimmed over the sofa.

And then it sharpened immediately and wandered back to her.

“Good afternoon,” he said.

“Good afternoon,” she croaked, then cleared her throat. “How long have you been here?”

There was that quick quirk of his mouth again. “Long enough to discover,” he said, “that you beat me to the food I asked Slater to send up here.”

So the delicious refreshments were not for her? Letitia removed the blanket and sat up.

“I beg your pardon,” she mumbled, embarrassment burning her cheeks. “I hope I left enough to forestall your demise from starvation.”

Sir Percival chuckled. “So, did you find what you were looking for?” He changed the subject and rose to his feet.

Oh! How did he guess she’d searched for Sarah’s portrait? Letitia put on her slippers and stood as well.

“You have a fine library here,” she offered.

“At your disposal whenever you wish to use it.” He bowed his head slightly and turned toward the door.

“Are you leaving?” she asked, disappointed. There was still the matter of her pin money.

“No.” He arched a brow. “I thought you were.” He seemed to be waiting for her to do exactly that.

“Not yet, now that you are here,” she said, affronted by the unceremonious dismissal. “I came here to ask you about my pin money. I hope my father included more in the dowry than Wycombe Oaks, because that ruin is hardly worth a sixpence, if you ask me. Though, of course, it doesn’t matter to me if it makes you happy to own it again.”

His countenance clouded, and a glint of agitation passed over it.

“That ruin, hardly worth a sixpence to you, is worth more than any other place on earth to me,” he said. “My family lived there for centuries, and I lived there until…we moved out. I know its wretched condition better than you, remembering what it was like when I was a child and seeing it die a slow death over the years. It was my inheritance my fa—your father acquired. Does it surprise you I wanted to get back what my family spent centuries creating?”

“Why did you not approach and ask him to resell it to you, then? What would you have done if I’d married someone else?” she asked, taken aback by the ferocity in his voice.

“I had my plans,” he replied, regaining his composure. “For reasons I cannot quite fathom, your father seems to dislike my family and refused me before, despite the fact that I made him a very advantageous offer. Your brother, had he lived, or your husband, had you married someone else, might have been more amenable. I only needed to wait.”

“What if neither were?” she said uneasily. His penetrating, hot gaze began to affect more than her brain.

“That was entirely possible, of course.” He nodded. “However, considering its condition, my hope was not entirely unfounded.”

“I wish you great success.” She turned for the door. This was definitely not a good time to ask how much money he was going to give her. It wasn’t hard to guess how her dowry, if there had been
any
in addition to Wycombe Oaks, would be spent. “One must wonder what possessed my father to buy such a ruin in the first place.”

Sir Percival’s expression hardened again, and the glint of irritation returned. “Is this what you think?” he growled. “Come.”

Without giving her a chance to escape, he took her by the elbow and maneuvered her around the sofa to the table on which was an album she had noticed before. He let go of her and reached for the cover. Yet his touch continued radiating some strange awareness that did not go away with the grip of his hand.

Her comment must have really ruffled his feathers. Letitia watched as Sir Percival turned pages with more anger than the task required, until he found what he wanted and pointed the page out to her.

She raised her brows in question, and then glanced at the watercolor. It showed the familiar castle and the mansion that blended into it.

Letitia stared, amazed. There could be no mistake, even though the view in front of her was very different from what she had seen after a week of living at Wycombe Oaks.

A wall enclosed the courtyard. A large, old oak tree stood to one side of it, surrounded by the lawn. A wide, paved drive flanked by small trees in tubs led to the entrance and disappeared on a bend through an arched gateway in the direction of the stables and the carriage house. The lawn on the other side of the drive, symmetrical to that with the oak tree, had a sundial placed in the circle of gravel in its middle, with shrubs at the corners of each of the four paths leading out of it. One of the paths led to a wall covered with climbing roses. It terminated in a niche where a statue of Pan stood guarding a stone bench in front of its plinth.

The passage of twenty-odd years, even the passage of twenty-odd years of neglect, could not account for the destruction she had seen.

Letitia remembered the oak tree, the lonely survivor, but gone were the lawns, the bench, the statue and the sundial. The uneven ground was overgrown with weeds. The drive had shrunk to a faint muddy path with tracks of various depths impressed by infrequent vehicles that came to the main entrance. The wall had been reduced to its foundation and covered with dirt, a few saplings left to struggle between the stones.

She remembered seeing a wild rose somewhere in that mess, a speckle of cheerfulness amid the chaos and destruction. It was probably the only survivor of the splendid climbers preserved in the watercolor.

Was it her father who had allowed such deliberate destruction? Why hadn’t he managed this estate the way he managed his other properties? Why had he purchased it in the first place?

Letitia glanced sideways at her husband. He watched her, as gloomy as the weather outside.

“This is the home I once had,” he said, his voice matching his expression. “This is how Wycombe Oaks appeared at the time it changed hands.”

The intensity of his gaze could discompose even a stone. Was he blaming her for her father’s neglect? That would be absurd. Maybe he simply hoped she would never return to the library. Well, perhaps she would not. Yet her mind now churned with too many unanswered questions.

“Do you have other drawings showing the house?” she asked after a moment.