Sheri Cobb South (4 page)

The apple gained speed as it descended, and Amanda did likewise. How too, too annoying if it should be lost in the stream, when at any moment that disagreeable old
married
duke might appear and put a stop to her clandestine inroads into his apple harvest!

She was breathless by the time she reached the stream, but her efforts had not been in vain. As the apple neared the water, she dropped to her knees and stretched out her arm to snatch at it—just in time to see it roll out of reach and come to a stop against a booted foot.

Amanda, still on her knees, looked up and up, past the shining black leather boot, buff-colored breeches, and brown coat to the wearer’s face. At the sight of tightly curling chestnut hair and twinkling hazel eyes, she suffered a shortness of breath and a pounding of heart that had nothing to do with her recent exertions. As the stranger stooped to pick up the apple, she became painfully aware of her disheveled hair and the gypsy hat, once so becoming, now hanging down her back.

“H-have the goodness, sir, to return my property, if you please,” she said, finding her tongue at last.

“Your property?” echoed the stranger, offering his hand to help her to her feet. “And who might you be, if I may be so bold? No, don’t tell me; let me guess! Demeter, goddess of the harvest!
Or do I mean Ceres?”

“As one is
Greek and the other Roman, either will suffice, although neither is correct,” she said, rising with his assistance and self-consciously brushing the dust from the skirts of her plain round gown.

“Ah! An educated mind as well as a lovely face!”

“You are too kind, sir. Now, if you will return my apple, I will be on my way.”

“But as I saved your apple, and quite possibly your own fair self, from a wetting, surely I am deserving of some reward,” protested the gentleman.

In the eighteen years of her existence, Amanda had formed a very fair idea of the form such “rewards” generally took. She lifted her chin, puckered her lips, and closed her eyes, her manner reminiscent of a vestal virgin about to be sacrificed to a pagan deity.

“Delicious!” declared the stranger in a muffled voice.

Amanda’s eyes flew open just in time to see him sink his teeth for the second time into the apple’s crisp, juicy flesh. For reasons she could not fully explain, she found his taking liberties with her apple even more offensive than the prospect of his taking them with her person. “Release that apple, sir! It is mine!”

“Is it, indeed? I was under the impression that these orchards belonged to the duke of Montford. Unless, of course, you are the duchess?”

A half-formed hope that this handsome stranger might prove to be the duke himself now shriveled and died. “The old duke always allowed me to pick his apples.”

“But the old duke is dead. Long live the new one,” added the stranger, biting into the apple once again.

“And what right, pray, have
you
to be here?” challenged Amanda, her eyes narrowing in suspicion. “Unless, of course, you are the duke?”

“Alas, I am only Mr. Peregrine Palmer, a mere nobody, at your service,” he said, clicking his heels together and sketching a bow.

“Then you have no more right to be here than I do!”

“In fact, I have considerably less,” he admitted. “I never knew the old duke, you see. In fact, I have no claim at all save for the demands of an empty belly and a stream full of trout.”

“You are poaching the duke’s fish!” exclaimed Amanda, noticing for the first time the fishing rod lying on the grassy bank beside the stream.

“Shh!” Mr. Peregrine Palmer put a finger to his lips. “Let’s not tell him, shall we? After all, his Grace can hardly miss what he never had.”

A broad wink accompanied these words, and Amanda, blushing rosily, gave a little huff of annoyance. “Very well, sir, since you will not return my apple—and I would not have it in its present condition in any case,” she added quickly, as he silently offered her the half-eaten core, “I will bid you good day.”

As she nimbly picked her way across the stream on strategically placed stones, Mr. Palmer was at last moved to repentance. “I say, don’t leave! I meant no offense, Miss— Demeter—wait! I don’t even know your name!”

He followed her across the steppingstones, but as he lacked her long acquaintance with them, he made an awkward business of it.

“Please wait, Demeter—”

As she reached the opposite bank, he grabbed at her sleeve, but she snatched her arm away. Resisting the urge to turn around, she heard a swift intake of breath and a muttered oath, then a large splash. Not knowing whether to laugh or cry, she hitched up her skirts and ran up the hill toward home.

Chapter 3

By the time she reached her home, Amanda Darrington had worked herself into a high dudgeon. Never in all her eighteen years had she been treated so cavalierly by a man, and it galled her to think that such treatment should come at the hands of one who was not only male, but young and handsome into the bargain. To add insult to injury, the most crushing rejoinders now sprang readily to her lips—now, when it was too late to use them. She hoped she never saw the insufferable fellow again, and wished she knew more about him and where he was staying—only so that she might make a special point of avoiding him, of course.

On this thought, she entered the drawing room and found it in a state of chaos. A fair-haired, bespectacled stranger sat on a straight chair before the fire, with Philip kneeling on the floor at his feet peppering him with questions. Behind him fluttered Aunt Hattie, wringing her hands and making little clucking noises indicative of sympathy. Margaret, wrapping a length of gauze about the stranger’s forehead, paused in this endeavor long enough to address her sister in scolding tones.

“Whatever took you so long, Amanda? I was beginning to think—good heavens!” she cried, taking a closer look at her younger sister. “Whatever will Mr. Fanshawe think of you?”

The tutor, however, showed no signs of being repelled by the younger Miss Darrington’s appearance. In fact, his open mouth and slightly glazed eyes gave Margaret to understand that he scarcely noticed Amanda’s disordered curls and dusty skirt, being fully occupied in assimilating the myriad charms of flashing eyes, flushed cheeks, and swelling bosom.

“Dea certe!”
he breathed aloud, to no one in particular.

“Hardly a goddess, Mr. Fanshawe,” retorted Miss Darrington with some asperity. “Amanda, this is Philip’s new tutor. Mr. Fanshawe, my sister, Amanda.”

“How do you do,” said Amanda, bobbing the obligatory curtsy. “But—forgive me, but what has happened to you? Have you met with an accident?”

“I—I—I—” floundered James.

“Mr. Fanshawe was set upon by ruffians on the road,” Margaret translated, seeing that the tutor’s own explanation was likely to be a very long time in coming. “But Aunt Hattie has prepared a mustard plaster, and we shall have him set to rights in a trice. Meanwhile, I suppose we had best send for the doctor, and inform Sir Humphrey. He is a Justice of the Peace and the highest-ranking gentleman in the area, barring the duke,” she explained for the sufferer’s benefit. “Philip, you may saddle up Daisy and—”

“I’ll go,” put in Amanda. “I have not yet put off my hat.” This was not quite true, as the hat still hung down her back by its ribbon.

“I should hate to put Miss Amanda to any trouble—” protested James, finding his tongue at last.

“It is no trouble at all,” she assured him hastily. “Surely each of us has a duty to do what we can to see that such ruffians do not go unpunished.”

“Very noble of you, Amanda, but you are hardly dressed for riding,” Margaret pointed out, frowning.

“I shan’t have to ride. It is the merest stroll, if one takes the shortcut across the stream and through the duke’s orchard.”

Margaret, tying off her bandage, failed to observe the heightened color that accompanied these words. She was concerned at the moment with a greater puzzle. The last thing she wanted was to cast her sister in an even more romantic light by allowing Mr. Fanshawe to see her as an avenging angel. Yet Amanda’s absence would allow her an opportunity to drop a word of warning into the tutor’s ear.

“Very well, but do not tarry,” she said, relenting. “It looks as if we might have rain before nightfall.”

“Thank you!” cried Amanda, flying to the door. Remembering her manners, she paused long enough to execute a quick curtsy and a breathless “pleased to meet you” to the tutor before darting out the door, slamming it behind her in her haste.

“There!” pronounced Margaret, laying aside the remaining strip of gauze. “Now that we have patched you up, Mr. Fanshawe, shall I show you the schoolroom while we wait for the doctor? Mr. Fanshawe?”

James, staring vacantly at the door through with Amanda Darrington had disappeared, made no reply.

“Mr. Fanshawe!” Margaret repeated with perhaps more force than was necessary.

“What? Oh, yes! The schoolroom,” said James, blinking. “Yes, I should like to see it.”

“Very well,” she said, suppressing a sigh. “Follow me.”

She led the way upstairs to the uppermost floor of the house. As they climbed, James noted the faint but undeniable signs of impoverished gentility. The house had been well built, for the stairs, though not broad, did not creak. The carpet covering them, however, was threadbare in the center of each riser, and the wall hangings, though clean, were faded.

The schoolroom itself was a large room under the eaves, with an uncarpeted floor and a plain deal table positioned beneath the gable windows for optimal lighting—and, not coincidentally, maximum preservation of candles. A scarred bookcase contained texts in Latin and Greek. James, scanning their titles, wondered how it was that he could remember ancient languages quite vividly, yet could not recall where he had been or what he had done the day before.

“—the globes, although I am not at all certain they will do you much good,” his employer was saying. “They are the same ones that I used as a girl, and my governess used to complain that they were outdated even then. Now what, pray, have I said to make you laugh?”

James was not laughing, but he could not help but smile at the implication that Miss Darrington’s girlhood lay in the dim and distant past. “One would think you had learned geography by studying cave paintings.”

“How very unhandsome of you to say so!” retorted Margaret with an answering smile. “I would have you to know that we had progressed to stone tablets by that time!”

“I stand corrected,” said James, and although his tone was meekness itself, his blue eyes twinkled behind the lenses of his spectacles. “But, elderly as you obviously are, should you not be hiring tutors for your own children, rather than your siblings?”

“Ah, so now I am not only ancient, but spinsterish into the bargain!” exclaimed Margaret, unoffended. “It was not always so, I assure you. Oh, I never had a Season in London—we never had the funds for that, even when Papa was alive—but I attended several assemblies in Bath, and even had one proposal of marriage.”

“Which you rejected.”

She nodded. “He was a widower who needed a mother for his five children. I decided that if I were to raise another woman’s children, I would rather by far raise my mother’s than a stranger’s. She died while Philip was still in the nursery, and Aunt Hattie came to care for us, but—well, you’ve met Aunt Hattie, so you should not find it surprising that much of the responsibility eventually shifted to me.”

“And you never had another offer?”

“There is a distinct lack of eligible suitors in Montford,” Margaret explained. Then, seeing the laughter fade from his eyes to be replaced with something akin to pity, she hastily added, “Pray do not think me the victim of a blighted romance, Mr. Fanshawe. He was at least twice my age, and his children were perfect hellions. I daresay if we had wed, I should have made the lot of them miserable—and they no doubt would have returned the favor.”

He smiled, but whatever reply he might have made was forgotten as his attention was caught by something outside the window. A glimpse of Amanda, thought Margaret with a sinking heart. Mr. Fanshawe’s days were surely numbered, which was a great pity, as Philip had apparently taken a liking to him. She felt a surge of annoyance at her sister, which she knew to be wholly irrational. After all, it was not Amanda’s fault that her stunning beauty reduced even the most reasonable men to stammering idiocy. Margaret had always tried not to be jealous of her sister, and usually succeeded. Still, she could not help wondering somewhat wistfully what it must be like to have that effect, just once, on a man. She glanced at the tutor, still gazing fixedly out the window, and sighed.

In fact, she had wronged James, for the sight that so captured his attention was not the beauteous Amanda, but the stately brick edifice crowning a distant hill. “What is that?” he asked, moving closer to the window.

Margaret joined him there, and was surprised and somewhat pleased to find no sign of Amanda. “What? Oh, that! That is Montford Priory, the principal seat of the duke of Montford.”

“A right regal old pile.”

“Indeed it is, both inside and out.”

“And over there?” He tapped on the glass, indicating a broken wall of gray stones just visible through the trees.

“All that remains of the original priory, given to the Weatherly family by Henry VIII after the dissolution of the monasteries,” Margaret explained.

“Obviously the Church’s loss was the duke’s gain,” James observed. “Don’t tell me the ruins aren’t haunted, for I won’t believe it!”

“Oh, but they are! At least, the locals insist upon it, although no one has ever actually seen any ghostly monk. He is said to appear only to the heir, usually upon his inheriting the title.”

“To demand the return of church property, no doubt,” suggested James.

“No, for he makes no attempt to harm, or even to frighten—although I daresay he achieves the latter even without putting forth much effort. I believe his intent is not so much to threaten as it is to inspect. He must wonder why the place has stood empty for so many months.”

“Empty?”