The Black Sheep's Return (4 page)

Improvising with the rough piece of unbleached cloth he probably used for wiping the dishes for a towel, she made sure the door was firmly shut before unlacing her short corset and stripping off her ragged and dirty shift. The blessed relief of cool water and remarkably good soap on her skin made her sigh with pleasure and she washed the sweat and fear
and grime from her face and upper torso before attending to her filthy and scratched legs and feet. It wasn’t easy to get yourself thoroughly clean while standing on one leg, she found, and a sponge or flannel would have been a wonderful help.

Frowning at the very feel of her still half-pinned-up hair and the wild bird’s nest the rest of it felt as bits tried to escape while the rest was still in a knot, she searched for her hairpins and piled them up on the table and sighed with relief when the whole heavy mass tumbled down. Oh, the sheer pleasure and relief of feeling the uncombed length of it flow down her back and the pull and tangle subside a little. Freya went back to her filthy feet and legs and found another bowl to fill with clean water when the soap scum and mire in the first seemed too disgusting to use any more.

At last she felt as clean as she could make herself without a hot bath and shut off the blissful thought of one of those with a regretful sigh at the very moment the door to the little kitchen-cum-scullery opened and Orlando strode in. Horrified and at the same time oddly frozen in her position, half-propped and half-sitting on the table so she could wash her good foot and take the weight off her bad one,
she blushed so hotly it felt as if every inch of her must be covered in shame. Peeping at him from behind her tumbling mass of hair, she saw an arrested, almost shocked look on his face—as if he’d been hit on the head for no good reason. This time she noted numbly that his eyes were as clear and green as his little daughter’s by daylight and full of contrary emotions as they fixed on her like a sailor sighting land after a long voyage.

‘I beg your pardon,’ he finally managed in a deeper and huskier voice than normal and turned sharply about and was out of the door before she could think of a word to say.

Since she still couldn’t, it was probably as well he’d disappeared faster than a scalded cat, she decided, making herself finish her makeshift
toilette
. She was contemplating her grubby chemise and shift with disgust when the door opened the smallest distance it took for a vigorous male hand to squeeze through it, then drop clean replacements on the floor before shutting it firmly once more. For some odd reason it seemed funny and Freya gratefully pulled on the chemise as she tried not to giggle hysterically at the latest act in the farce she and Orlando seemed to be playing.

She looked ruefully at the shift before
scrambling into it and decided his wife must have been considerably shorter than herself. It seemed she would have to wear her own half-ruined gown to preserve any hint of decency, if only she knew what he’d done with it. The next time the door did its remarkable trick he produced a cotton bedcover she took silently and wrapped round her body like a bath towel, before stiffening her shockingly naked shoulders and hopping out to face him as best she could. It took every ounce of well-honed Buckle pride to meet his eyes as if he hadn’t just seen her in the same state of nature in which she came into the world.

‘I should like to borrow a comb,’ she said loftily.

‘These belonged to my wife,’ he said with so little expression in his green gaze as he handed her a brush and comb she almost forgot to be deeply mortified for a moment.

‘Thank you,’ she returned and raised her eyebrows at him to indicate he should now make himself scarce if he was any sort of a gentleman at all.

‘I have been promised an outfit that I doubt very much is up to your usual standards whilst your own gown is being washed and mended. I will see you have it as soon as possible now
you are up and awake,’ he said stiffly and took himself off.

Freya crossed to the bed with more painful effort than she liked to think about and sank down on it before pulling the curtain across behind her so she would have the belated illusion of privacy. She examined the brush as if it might give her some clue to the woman who once owned it, but not even one stray strand remained to tell her what colour hair the lady had rejoiced in. Freya sighed and began the long and frustrating business of combing out the wild tangles from her own heavy mane and heartily wished for the ladies’ maid she had left at Bowland with not even a second thought how she would shift for herself without her. Of course she knew how to comb her own hair, everyone knew that, but she thought of the gentle patience little Mercy Dawkins had always shown her exacting mistress and felt oddly ashamed as she teased knot after knot from her rebellious locks.

She wasn’t a fool, she decided as distance and the oddest of circumstances made her think hard about her day-to-day self, but Lady Freya Buckle had managed to go through life so far without thinking too hard about herself or those around her. The loss of her grandfather
had hit her far harder than that of her own father and the sudden death of her mother two years earlier had shaken her world to its very foundations. Apart from those two heavy losses, the only event that had caused her even the mildest suffering until yesterday was the marriage of his Grace the Duke of Dettingham to Miss Jessica Pendle, and that certainly wasn’t because her heart was broken.

No, she decided now with a preoccupied frown as she finally tracked down the piece of twig caught in the depths of her worst knot so far and set about removing it without pulling a hank of hair out with it, the fact that he preferred a lame spinster to the Earl of Buckland’s pretty daughter had been the first indication the rest of the world didn’t share her conviction she was entitled to all the best things in life that society had to offer her. For a while she had been so offended and furious she hadn’t asked herself why Jack Seaborne, Duke of Dettingham, preferred damaged Miss Pendle to her pristine and noble self.

She and her mother had been a little too sure Lady Freya would be the next Duchess and the subsequent Little Season had been dogged by sniggers and snide whispers as she tried to pretend she didn’t care that the new Duchess was
still on a protracted wedding journey about the Lakes with her besotted husband. The most eligible bachelors had begun to slide out of dances with her and find themselves engaged when Lady Bowland organised an elegant supper party or visit to the theatre and Freya had somehow become a laughing stock to the very people she had so wanted to impress with her ancient lineage and proud good looks when she made her début.

It had taken Lady Bowland’s death and two years of living at Bowland, instead of comfortably ensconced in the Dower House with Mama, to finally make her realise she was not some entitled being, blessed by every god of good fortune at her christening. Being stripped of the advantages of wealth and rank had forced her into her true self: Lady Freya, the glowing hope of her mother and grandfather’s wildest dreams, was gone. Here sat a woman who must find out what she really wanted from life before it was too late to achieve it and suddenly she was determined to find out what that was as soon as possible.

She squirmed on the disarrayed bed and tried to tell herself it was the constant nag of pain from her ankle making her so restless, even as her fingers patiently continued
the task she’d set them. It wasn’t the fact she’d been seen mother-naked by Orlando, but she had to admit the sneaky idea it could be very pleasant indeed if he was entirely undressed too haunted her like a bad dream. She shifted impatiently again and had to suppress a yelp of agony as her injured foot reminded her how desperate her current situation was. Clearly it behoved her to behave like a lady for however long it took her to heal, then depart with as much of her tattered reputation and self-esteem intact as possible.

Despite her burning cheeks and the shock she should be suffering from, she wondered how she had looked to Orlando and didn’t even notice her busy fingers had found the last knot in her nut-brown hair and she was now combing the heavy softness of it as if her life depended on it. Even allowing for the flattery her rank and fortune attracted while the
ton
laughed at her behind her back, she knew she was pretty enough and reasonably well formed. She was shaped like a nymph rather than a goddess and some might consider her slight and unformed, of course. Yet perhaps some men preferred subtlety to the obvious charms of more buxom women, she let herself wonder. After all, her legs were long and
slender and her waist small above the long line of her hips. Feeling as guilty as if she was testing the ebb and flow of those very curves with her own hands to see if they could please a lover, she gasped at the thought of Orlando ever watching her with a lover’s eyes and told herself it was with horror at the very idea.

N
o use trying to pretend any longer she was essentially cold and passionless when she wasn’t even deceiving herself. The leap of hot and vigorous fire at the heart of her, the quickening of what felt like every inch of the body, made this new Freya feel very different from the old one. Not sure she approved of the change, she laid down the wide-toothed comb and took up the brush with the vague idea soothing her abused hair into shining smoothness might somehow turn her back into the safe and certain Freya she had been before she found Dukes didn’t obligingly fall into her lap like apples from a tree.

She had never felt this hot burn of curiosity towards the tall and strikingly handsome
Duke of Dettingham, of course, but had assured herself during that June when he’d set up a house party at Ashburton New Place to choose his Duchess that she was born and bred for marriage to the highest in the land. He was well enough and so was she and she assumed that would make their marriage bed a bearable place to beget a tribe of little lords and ladies.

Some determined remnant of the old Freya whispered she was right, but the idea of such a marriage with Jack Seaborne now seemed icy cold as she sat on the lowly bed of a lowly man and fought
not
to think about sharing it with him. Shorn of the stubble of the day before, his face had been sharply defined in the soft north light of the shadowy scullery. It wasn’t as if he was starkly handsome like Jack Seaborne, she told herself crossly, or romantically dashing like the Earl of Calvercombe, who had married Jack’s lovely cousin Persephone so soon after the ducal wedding that rumours of a dashing scandal had flown delightedly about the
ton
for weeks. Even young Telemachus Seaborne, known as Marcus, would outshine Orlando if he had cared to shine in anyone but his stormy-looking young wife’s eyes, and everyone knew theirs was another love match.

Why on earth she was sitting here dwelling
on the family who had begun her descent into the ranks of the unmarriageable she had no idea. Perhaps it was because Orlando struck her as a man of suppressed power, she suddenly realised, and her instincts were probably better than she’d realised back when so much was done for her she had never needed to test them. Or at least she hoped they were, because if he wasn’t an honourable man she could still be in deep trouble. It was obvious he had deliberately marooned himself in the heart of this forest where nobody would find him except by the purest chance, but he didn’t strike her as a man who would run from trouble. She could imagine him meeting it with guile and reckless courage, but not hiding where he could do no good except to his family and there, she decided with a triumphant sense of those instincts leading her well, was the key to the whole mystery.

For the wife she sensed had been more dearly loved by her Orlando than Lady Freya Buckle had ever dared dream of being loved by a man, he would have crossed oceans and fought every battle it took to keep her safe. The reason he was still here now had to mean there was some sort of threat to his children as well and she shook her head and frowned,
dubious at the idea anyone would harm such bright and hopeful little mysteries in miniature. Had he eloped with Mrs Orlando in the teeth of powerful opposition? she wondered. He was clearly raised a gentleman, so maybe he had been tutor to a noble family and run off with some great lord’s daughter? Or, worse still, could it have been the man’s own lady he stole away from him? She would have been the man’s legal chattel and he couldn’t raise a bill to divorce her in the House of Lords, or drag her home by her hair to fulfil her duty and bear
him
a boy instead, if he couldn’t actually find her in the first place.

Freya tried to be shocked by the very idea of such scandalous goings on, but found she couldn’t blame the woodsman’s wife if she had decided she preferred him to some fat old noble her family had forced her to marry. She had nearly been the victim of such a conspiracy herself, although she lacked the gallant rescuer who would make that marriage to the fat politician irrelevant. Finding herself guilty of the most shocking immorality as she wondered why the woman couldn’t have taken a handsome and vigorous young lover to make up for the lack of both in her marriage bed, Freya reminded herself this was all speculation
and even the prospect of a one-day lover could not have reconciled her to marriage with Bowland’s latest repellent protégé.

Maybe Orlando was a follower of Rousseau, or a romantic philosopher-poet who preferred a simple life wrenched from the forest by his own hand? Yet the picture of him, austere and intent as he stood and watched her for one long moment with hot green eyes telling of unimagined delights in his bed, argued he had once been a more rash and hedonistic adventurer than any idealistic poet or shrinking recluse could ever be. For a quick and wickedly exciting minute she knew how it felt to be urgently wanted by a compelling rake. Then he doused the lust and longing and promise sparking between them before it could become a blaze and walked away as if she was dressed from head to toe in propriety.

Dropping the brush on the rumpled bedclothes as if it had become red hot, Freya fought off the most ridiculous jealousy of the woman who once owned it. Her now wildly flying imagination invited her to visualise Orlando brushing her hair for her with long, sensual strokes as he played with the heavy locks and arranged them over her naked body to his satisfaction, before satisfying her as royally
as a woman had ever been satisfied by her man. Except she had no idea how it felt to be sensually seduced and satiated, she reminded herself sternly.

Nor did she want to know, if her lover had to be this penniless ex-pirate who hid in the woods from his own kind. A burn of curiosity tightened her suddenly very sensitive nipples under the bedcover toga and made her squirm against the surprisingly comfortable mattress under her, as she sought to douse the inquisitive fire at her feminine core. She told herself she didn’t want a rustic lover with two bold and enterprising children dependent on him as both father and mother, who were likely to resent even the smallest sharing of his attention with her. As soon as she could put her foot to the floor with any degree of comfort she would walk out of here and not look back, ever.

So why did it feel as if she was on sabbatical from her duty once she’d plaited her hair a little clumsily and tried to put her foot to the floor once more? Pain shot through her as sharp and almost sickening as it had been last night when she first injured herself. Fool, she castigated herself as she tottered across the room in search of the next necessity of life and peered out of the door for a privy or conveniently
secluded bush to relieve herself behind, since the problem was becoming urgent. Spotting a rustic shelter some yards upwind of the house, she blessed the fact she hadn’t tumbled into his cesspit last night and told herself Lady Freya Buckle could not afford to expect comfort in this most basic form of country life. She hopped towards the honeysuckle-covered shelter with her flapping bedcover grasped to her body with one hand, while she used the other to prop herself upright with a stout stick left leaning by the back door for her with a consideration she refused to find disarming.

It didn’t matter if he had been sensitive enough to her needs to let her get on with learning to do as much for herself as she could. Yet Lady Freya seemed to be fading into a stiff caricature of herself as she embraced being Perdita instead. She reflected on William Shakespeare’s story of a foundling princess left to be brought up by peasants. How would she have been now if she had been taken from Bowland Castle in some fanciful start of her father’s that her mother had been unfaithful and his despised daughter was not his child? A nagging suspicion she might be relieved
not
to be Lady Freya Buckle seemed
unthinkable, considering her mother brought her up so proud of the ancient name she bore.

Luckily the privy turned out to be surprisingly clean and smelt of tarred wood and earth as much as it did of humanity. Observing the strange device her host had rigged up for his family, she shovelled what looked like dried earth into the hole after herself and hoped that would cover everything, then limped back towards the cottage feeling considerably better, if now left with one less distraction from being very hungry indeed.

‘We’re having Percy for breakfast,’ the boy popped out of the trees at the other side of the clearing to inform her mysteriously and the little girl doggedly caught up with a squeal of triumph, as if she spent most of her life following her big brother about just in time to watch him disappear again.

‘Who is Percy?’ Freya asked distractedly as the delicious cooking smells emanating from the direction he had just come from began to tease her eager nostrils.

‘One of last year’s piglets,’ he told her with a resigned shrug for the realities of cottage life that left Freya wondering if she really wanted to know the name of her food before she ate it.

‘It smells delicious,’ she managed as hunger
fought her scruples for at least ten seconds as her mouth watered at the scent of breakfast and wood-smoke.

‘It is ’licious,’ Sally stated emphatically, with a frown in her direction, as if it was her fault they weren’t already eating. ‘Papa said we was to fetch you,’ she accused and Freya realised it would be no easy task to win over the female so firmly in possession of the cottage and its owner’s heart.

‘That was kind of him. I am very hungry indeed after missing my luncheon
and
my dinner yesterday,’ she said with unfeigned horror.

‘Not even any supper?’ the little girl asked with a slight softening towards this unwanted guest she had better not take for granted, Freya decided ruefully.

‘By then I was too tired to care,’ Freya confirmed and could almost see the child brace herself against nodding sympathetically.

‘We’re not tired and we’re very hungry indeed, since Papa had to light a fire in the woods to cook on because we weren’t supposed to disturb you,’ the boy asserted with a cool stare that accused her of causing a delay he found nigh intolerable.

‘And yet you still did so?’ she said just as
coolly and met his uncannily direct blue eyes equal to equal.

‘I never saw a dead person,’ he explained as if that trumped every idea of polite consideration his long-suffering parent had tried to teach him.

‘Oddly enough you still have not done so, have you?’ she parried.

‘No, unless you feel a bit ill?’ he suggested as if she might, out of consideration for those who were kind enough to delay their breakfast for her.

‘Not in the least,’ she said airily and discovered it was true. ‘Just a bit sore and my ankle hurts,’ she admitted as she hobbled along and even little Sally had to slow down to match her pace.

‘It could be worse than you think,’ the boy suggested hopefully.

‘Why are you so eager to see a dead person?’ she asked.

‘’Cause my mama is one and I can’t really remember what she looked like no more,’ he said crossly, as if he blamed her for asking, but was still too young to lie.

‘I’m very sorry about that. My mama is dead too, and I miss her every day of my life, but at least I remember her. I hadn’t realised
how lucky I was until I spoke to you, Master Whoever-you-are.’

‘That’s not my name,’ he said, reluctantly impressed she shared his motherless state.

‘He’s called Hal,’ the boy’s sister said impatiently, as if everyone ought to know that and she was a very ignorant visitor after all.

‘My name is Henry Craven, Master Henry Craven to you.’

‘Very well then, Master Henry,’ Freya said with the shadow of an elegant curtsy that was all she could manage with her staff clutched in her hand and an ankle that was sure to let her down if she bent any lower.

‘Who are you, then?’

‘Miss Perdita…’ Freya cast about for a suitable alias and found inspiration all around her. ‘Rowan,’ she finally came out with and decided she might like being Miss Rowan of nowhere in particular, if she wasn’t dressed in a bedcover and someone else’s underwear whilst hobbling along like a ninety-year-old invalid to eat a breakfast her hosts were personally acquainted with before it became a tasty meal.

‘It’s a pretty name,’ Sally approved with a smile of feminine conspiracy she must have acquired by instinct and years of manipulating her father mercilessly.

‘Thank you, and so is yours, Miss Craven.’

‘Papa, we found her,’ Sally cried as if they had been looking much of the day and Freya tried not to envy her host the confident joy in the little girl’s voice at the sight of him.

It would be easy to love the spirited and naughty little girl, Freya decided wistfully. Their father seemed to be raising his children as individuals, not patterns of childhood silence kept strictly away from the adult world her own father had expected children to be. She supposed it was easier to gently teach the realities of life when you lived in a hovel, not a mansion, and dined on what you could grow or raise, like poor Percy the pig.

‘Your breakfast, ma’am,’ Orlando said with a piratical bow as he handed her a trencher of rough bread topped with bacon, mushrooms from the forest and her share of a kind of omelette he seemed to have made with the addition of herbs and tips of various greens from the large garden he must have hacked out of the forest.

‘Thank you, kind sir,’ she said as she sank on to the tree stump they had saved for her with as much dignity as she could manage, which wasn’t much as she tried to ease herself
down without jarring her foot. ‘It smells delicious.’

‘Your fork, ma’am,’ he added with the wicked parody of a liveried and impassive footman that made her wonder anew about his real place in the world.

‘What a delightful luxury, Mr Craven,’ she said lightly as she took the two-pronged, freshly carved wooden one he must have whittled especially for her.

‘Then eat, Miss…’ he said, trailing off as he realised she hadn’t given her surname last night.

‘She’s called Miss Rowan, Papa, had you forgot?’ his son piped between mouthfuls of food and shook his head at them with such quaint wonder they were bothering with social flummery while their food went cold that Freya was reluctantly enchanted all over again.