Douglas: Lord of Heartache (5 page)

“You don’t have to do this, you know.”

“I beg your pardon?” His tone wasn’t begging anything and suggested he never would.

“You don’t have to make it your personal mission to return me to the land of gentlemanly manners,” she bit out. “I concede defeat, your lordship. I will acquiesce in your displays of civility, but you need not be so willing to put your hands on my person.”

“Are my hands on your person, then?”

“You know to what I refer.”

“I do,” he allowed. “You referred to it as manners and civilities. Let me ask you a question, though, Miss Hollister.”

He paused on a slight rise offering a view of the autumn gardens. Asters and pansies bloomed in colorful abundance, and the chrysanthemums were coming into their glory.

“Your question, my lord?”

“Have I at any point touched you against your will?”

“No. No, damn you, you have not.”

***

Miss Hollister dropped Douglas’s arm and strode away into the house. From the set of her shoulders, she was crying again, which was understandable. She’d had much to cry about, and unless he missed his guess, she’d probably allowed herself very few tears.

They were similar in that regard, he and this fallen, knowledgeable woman who loved both her child and her land so fiercely.

He took himself back down to the stables and arranged to leave Regis in his shady paddock and ride his borrowed mount over to Willowdale. He would swap horses tomorrow, and Regis, at least, would get some rest.

This assumed, of course, Miss Hollister was willing to have him and his gentlemanly manners tagging along again the following day. Because such an assumption might well be faulty, Douglas retraced his steps to the house, using the kitchen door and finding both the cook and a scullery maid on hand.

“Your pardon, but where might I find Miss Hollister?”

The cook was elbow deep in bread dough but gave an awkward imitation of a curtsy, as did the scullery maid at the sink. “She be in the nursery, milord. Third floor, back o’ the house,” the cook replied.

“My thanks.” He went in search of his quarry, though the maid and cook exchanged a smirk as he turned to go, of which he was quite aware. All the women in this house were in want of proper guidance—or something.

The location of the nursery was easy to ascertain, because Douglas could hear a child’s voice from halfway down the corridor, singing an old folk song, something about not having wings to fly.

Rose sprang across a combination playroom and schoolroom. “Hello! Mama says you are our cousin. How do you do, Cousin?”

She hugged him around his thighs, stepped back to make a child’s curtsy, then held up her arms as if to be lifted into an embrace. When Douglas blinked down at her presumption, she gave her arms a little shake, suggesting he hadn’t noticed their upraised position.

Needs must. He hefted the child up onto his hip. “Hello, Miss Rose. How are you today?”

“I am all punished. Do you want to see?”

Douglas’s little backside would have been thoroughly striped for a misadventure such as Rose’s, but then his father had sought any excuse to discipline his sons, and his mother had never interfered. Surely Miss Hollister was of a more enlightened bent?

“I suppose you will not rest until you show me,” he said, setting the child down.

“Rose, who are you…?” Rose scampered past her mother’s skirts as Miss Hollister emerged from an adjoining room, probably the child’s bedroom. “Lord Amery.” Her greeting was a verbal cannonball fired across Douglas’s quarterdeck.

“Miss Hollister.” He gave her a bow worthy of the churchyard on Easter morning. “We parted before making plans for either the immediate or the near term. I am loathe to present myself on your doorstep only to find my company is an imposition.”

And he did not want to part from her in anger, though anger was probably much of what sustained her.

Rose came bouncing into the room, several sheets of paper clutched in her hands. “Do you still want to see my punishment?”

“Most assuredly,” Douglas said, letting himself be led to a low table surrounded by small chairs. As they passed Miss Hollister, he caught a bracing whiff of lavender and indignation. Rose popped onto one of the chairs, but Douglas, fearing to look ridiculous while he broke one attempting the same, sat cross-legged on the floor beside the child.

“This,” said Rose, “is my first one.”

Her work was surprisingly expressive as she described in images one nasty possible outcome of her tree-climbing after another. She had caught with appalling accuracy the fear on her mother’s face, the horror on the stableboys’, and a grim determination on Douglas’s own visage. The final picture was of Miss Hollister sitting next to a gravestone, over which a huge bouquet of pink and purple flowers had been placed.

“’Cause I could be dead.”

“But you are not,” Douglas countered softly.

“I’m not!” Rose bolted for the next room. “I’ll be back!”

“She draws amazingly well,” Douglas said to her mother as he got to his feet. Miss Hollister leaned against the doorjamb, arms crossed, her expression hard to read.

“She enjoys it. Do you like children?”

“I hardly know. Miss Rose is the first child with whom I’ve any acquaintance, unless you count her little cousins at Willowdale and Oak Hall. And they, thankfully, are still quite in the nursery.”

“Mama, I’m ready!” Rose careened back into the room, a small bonnet in her hand. “Can we go now, and will Mister… Cousin Douglas walk with us?”

“He will,” Douglas said, deliberately cutting off any objection Miss Hollister might have made and silently excusing the child’s faulty grammar—and use of familiar address.

The girl chattered incessantly down two flights of stairs, through the house, and out onto the back terraces. She reported on what she saw, what she thought, what she felt, and what she would have felt if various contingencies—such as a wild unicorn from Mongolia galloping into the garden—were to occur. When they reached the gardens below the back terrace, Rose galloped off to see if a certain bush still had any flowers, abandoning her mother to Douglas’s company.

Had Rose’s mother ever been so voluble and carefree?

“Managing a few thousand acres must seem a lark after trying to manage that one child.”

“Sometimes,” Miss Hollister replied. “Not always. An estate can’t love you back.”

Douglas gave her a curious look, but she said no more on this topic, and he did not ask her to elucidate particulars, though elucidating particulars was one of her strengths. Miss Hollister had walked off a little way to sit on a stone bench with a clear view of her cavorting daughter.

“She’ll come back from time to time, then go off, then come back,” Miss Hollister explained. “We might as well have that discussion about our calendar, my lord.”

Douglas gestured to the bench. “May I?”

She swished her skirts aside. “Of course.”

“I foresee a complication, Miss Hollister,” Douglas said, his gaze on the child as she systematically sniffed each rose in a blooming bed. “You have apparently instructed your daughter to refer to me as Cousin Douglas, and yet you, who would be my closer relation were I Rose’s cousin, are still referring to me as my lord, and Lord Amery, and so forth.”

“Children are often permitted less formal address.”

He
certainly hadn’t been as a child. “Will it not confuse Rose if you address Heathgate and Greymoor by their Christian names, and yet I remain a title to you?”

“It’s time Rose learned something of proper address. You might as well be the example.”

He expected stubbornness from her on this matter—on every matter thus far and for the foreseeable future as well—and because he, too, was stubborn, he liked it about her, for the most part.

“When we travel to Sussex,” Douglas said, “you have assured me you will do so only as my relation or something of that nature. You do not refer to your familial relations formally, though both of your cousins hold titles. Rose knows this much and will surely remark on your inconsistency at some point when others are in her hearing.”

Children were demons about adult inconsistency. Even Douglas knew that much of their natures.

“Do as you will.” Miss Hollister stalked off in the direction of her daughter.

That was not quite clear permission to address her by her Christian name, which was, of course, what he had been angling for. She
did
call Heathgate, Greymoor, and even Fairly—Astrid Alexander’s brother, and thus no relation to Miss Hollister at all—by their Christian names, and she
had
insisted she and Douglas travel to Sussex as relations.

“Mama!” Rose’s scream pierced the afternoon quiet, a scream conveying fear and pain. “Maaaaaaamaaaaaa!” The screaming continued as Douglas sprang off the bench and vaulted hedges and walls to get to the child.

“Rose!” Douglas bellowed. “Hold still. Stop thrashing this instant!” Then in a more civil voice, he called out, “She’s all right.” And she more or less was, though Douglas’s heart pounded with both exertion and the mortal dread her screams had inspired.

“I am not all right!” Rose screeched. “Ouch!”

“I misspoke,” Douglas conceded. “If you will hold still, I will extricate you from those bushes, and all will be well.”

“All will not be well,” Rose spat back. “I saw a snake and he scared me and then the rose bushes grabbed me and they are using their thorns to bite at me.”

“What shameful manners,” Douglas observed as he separated Rose’s clothing from the offending bushes. “Tonight their mamas will make them draw pictures of what dire fates can befall rose bushes that bite innocent little girls.”

“I’ll have the gardeners rip them out,” Rose said. “I’ll put poison on their roots. I’ll plant daisies here that don’t have any old thorns. I’ll let the bugs eat up all the roses, and leaf spot, and beetles, and all manner of awful things.”

Douglas disentangled Rose from her tormentors, grabbed her elbows, and hoisted her straight up, then swung her out of the flower bed over to the grass.

“Mama! There was a snake and he scared me and the roses bit me and their mamas must punish them. Cousin Douglas said.”

She hurled herself against her mother’s skirts; Miss Hollister knelt and brushed dark locks back from Rose’s forehead.

“Sweetheart?”

That particular tone of voice was one Douglas had not heard from the lady before—gentle, coaxing, soft, and reassuring. He
felt
her tone of voice as much as heard it.

“Yes, Mama?”

“Was there really, truly a snake?”

Rose looked away, her bashful expression reminding Douglas of her mother’s similar fleeting bouts of shyness.

“There was,” Rose decided indignantly. “It was an awful, mean old snake, like in the Bible.”

“Perhaps you could describe this ferocious serpent?” Douglas suggested.

Rose thought for a moment, her imagination no doubt warming to the subject. “He was huge and he had mean eyes and he waved his tongue at me.” She demonstrated dramatically. “He was miles long and he hissed steam out his nose and he was green, with great ugly black spots.”

And of course, this horrible monster was male.

“A terrifying prospect,” said Douglas, finding it needful to study the pink roses flourishing nearby. “I believe I am familiar with the species. It particularly delights in flinging little girls into rose bushes when they feel a great falsehood coming on.”

“Let’s go, Mama,” Rose said, tugging on her mother’s hand and shooting Douglas a puzzled look. “I don’t want the snake to come back. Come, Cousin Douglas, or that snake might gobble you up.”

“I am atremble with trepidation,” he replied, taking the hand Rose proffered. Before he’d escorted the ladies back to the terrace, Rose was off once more, chasing a butterfly.

While Miss Hollister regarded Douglas with the faintest hint of…
a
smile
. “You are quite the athlete, my lord.”

“I had never considered what excitement raising a child entails. It is nerve-wracking, is it not? Hornets, snakes, thorns… I’ve known Rose only two days, and she has enlivened my existence considerably.”

Which was nothing less than the honest and surprising truth.

“And you hers,” Miss Hollister said, smiling more broadly. Rose was making a complete circuit of the garden at a dead run. “She’s going to fall.” Sure enough, on a tight corner, Rose slid in the grass, got right up, and pelted off.

“Nerve-wracking. May I call you Guinevere?” Because every occasion when he called her
Miss
Hollister, he felt a bit uncomfortable for her.

Put like that, a simple request humbly made, and she was again looking bashful. Douglas wondered how long it had been since a man had
asked
for the privilege of familiar address with her. Such intimacy was a family member’s privilege, a close friend’s, or… a fiancé’s. “I do not mean to be forward, Miss Hollister, it just seems that under the—”

She put a finger on his lips then, a light, fleeting touch, accompanied by a shake of her head.

“Gwen. And I shall call you Douglas.”

“Just so. You shall call me Douglas.”

They fell into another silence, this one different from any of the previous gaps in their conversations. For Douglas, the quiet had a sweetness, a stirring of benevolence toward his hostess and her noisy, happy, nerve-wracking child.

They walked together to the stables and agreed Douglas would borrow the gelding and return the following day.

“I’ll be off then,” Douglas said as they ambled down the barn aisle. “If I make another day of it with you here, then spend through Wednesday in Town, we can be on our way early Thursday. Has Rose a pony?”

“This one.” Miss Hollister—Guinevere—gestured to a stall where a petite and venerable white mare lipped at some hay. “If I thought Daisy would make the journey, I’d bring her along, but it would be asking too much. And I’m sure any property Andrew owns will have decent riding horses.”

Miss—Guinevere—accompanied Douglas to the stable yard where he checked his gelding’s girth one last time, then swung up without benefit of a mounting block and turned the horse down the drive.