Between the Devil and Ian Eversea: Pennyroyal Green Series Page 2

  She suspected the duke considered her a speck, too. A temporary problem to be handed off to another man, whose problem she would then become. A baton of sorts, in the eternal marriage relay.

  So be it. She wrapped her arms around herself and gave a little shiver of anticipation. She wanted to be married. Imagine what all of her erstwhile friends in New York would say if she became the Duchess of this or the Countess of that. And if someone could find her a duke for a husband, surely it was another duke?

  Likely she’d never see Giancarlo again.

  She did feel a minute pang of regret. She’d never anticipated it would all reach such an . . . untidy . . . crescendo. It had begun with a variety of glances—fleeting and lingering, sidelong and direct—sent and intercepted. And then, experimentally, she’d timed a pretend slip on the foredeck just as he was passing; her hand had curled over his arm as he helped her to right herself, and as she stammered thanks, standing a bit too close, his pupils had gone huge.

  This closeness had evolved into an invitation to stroll on the deck.

  She understood enough Italian to know that Giancarlo (his bicep tightened beneath her grip when she accidentally-on-purpose breathed his name for the first time—“Giancarlo”—as he helped her to her feet again) was saying things no gentleman should say to any proper lady—reckless, stirring, often baffling things. He would like to kiss her. Her lips were like plums. Her lips were like roses. Her ass was like a peach. Her skin was like a lily. All manner of flora and fauna were represented in his compliments. He would like to do other things besides kiss her. She wasn’t familiar with Italian slang, more’s the pity, because she expected she’d have gotten quite an education.

  She’d even mulled allowing him to do one or two of the things he professed to wanting to do. And with each passing day on the ship the lips of her hired companion, Mrs. Gorham, had gone thinner and thinner and thinner and her underbreath muttered warnings grew darker and darker. But Tansy couldn’t stop. She was a virtuoso of flirtation who’d been denied an opportunity to practice her art for far too long, and the whole episode had acquired the momentum of a driverless carriage rolling downhill.

  It was probably a very good thing the ship had docked when it did.

  She ventured out onto the little balcony outside her window and searched the English sky, but she couldn’t find the particular constellation she wanted to see. And though she knew it was ridiculous, it was this more than anything that made her feel bereft all over again, as if she were spiraling aimlessly through the heavens, like so much dandelion fluff, inconsequential, destined never to land.

  Somewhere out there in the Sussex dark was the home she’d once known and loved fiercely as a little girl. Lilymont. Sold when her father had taken his family off to America. She wondered who owned it now. Her home in New York had been sold, too, as dictated by her father’s will, and though she missed it, in a peculiar way it was also a relief. After her parents died, nearly everything once familiar and beloved—from furniture to flowers in the garden—had seemed foreign, even a little sinister, like props in an abandoned theater.

  She needed a home of her own. And she wouldn’t have a home, a real home, of her own again until she was married.

  And now the silence seemed total and fraught, like the aftermath of a gunshot, and the dark outside wasn’t the dark of thick woods frilling the edges of the New York estate. Even the stars seemed strange and new viewed from this side of the Atlantic. They called the constellations by different names here in England, she recalled. The Big Dipper was called instead the Starry Plough. She was uncertain about the rest of them, but it wasn’t as though she’d learned the Queen’s English the way she’d learned Italian.

  All she knew for certain was that she didn’t like the dark, and she didn’t like quiet, and she didn’t like to be alone.

  She reached for a night robe, thrust her arms into it and tied up the bow at the neck, shoved her feet into a pair of satin slippers, seized her lit lamp and tiptoed down the long marble stairs.

  Her surroundings were so unfamiliar it was like moving through a dream, and she liked it. It seemed to carry as little consequence; it seemed as though anything could happen, as though anyone or anything could appear, monsters, dragons, princes, ghosts. She almost wished something would appear, simply for novelty’s sake. She’d stopped being afraid some time ago.

  She found herself in the kitchen by instinct, as if it was the heart of the house and she’d followed the sound of its beat. A slice of bread, perhaps a cup of something hot. She knew her way around a kitchen well enough to heat a kettle.

  Unsurprisingly, a vase of flowers going limp from the heat of the kitchen was in the middle of the kitchen table. For heaven’s sake. She gave her head an imperious little toss. Not too long ago she’d collected bouquets as effortlessly as she collected beaux.

  A boy on the hearth snored softly, and stirred and muttered in his sleep. She supposed his job was to turn the grand haunch suspended on a spit over the fire. The haunch was near to being licked at by low flames. It would burn.

  “Pssst,” she said.

  He shot upward, all limbs flailing like an upturned spider for a moment until he righted himself, thrust his fists into his eyes and ground them a bit.

  “Cor! I nearly pissed meself, ye scared me so.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He stared at her for a moment. “Are ye an angel?” was his conclusion. He sounded almost accusatory.

  “Far from it.”

  “Was I asleep?”

  “You were.”

  “You be an angel then, m’lady, if you saved me from burning the haunch.”

  She laughed softly at that. Something about him—the sense of barely repressed mischief, no doubt—reminded her of her brother, who had been everyone’s darling. “I imagine you need your rest, and if you give it a crank now it should be fine. I’m Miss Danforth, a guest in the house. I was feeling a bit peckish and—”

  “Jordy! I thought I heard voices!”

  Both the boy and Tansy jumped this time. The voice belonged to a small woman who looked as soft and plump and homey as a loaf of rising bread. Rust-colored curls sprang from the confines of her nightcap and were still shimmying on her forehead. Clearly she’d hurried to the kitchen.

  “Oh, miss, ye must be Miss Danforth.” She curtsied, clutching her voluminous white night robe in her hands. “Mrs. Margaret deWitt at yer service, miss. I be the cook.”

  “I am Miss Danforth, and a pleasure to meet you, Mrs. deWitt. I’m so sorry to disturb you! It’s just that I felt a bit peckish, and I—”

  Miss deWitt lit up at those words. She lived to vanquish hunger and to fuss over young people. “Here now, Miss Danforth, you just sit down and I’ll make ye a cuppa and summat to eat. You’re a slip of a thing, ain’t ye? You ought to have rung and we’d have brought it up.”

  She was kind. Tansy knew this instinctively; her face, her voice, belonged to a woman who knew her place and liked it well. She felt a temptation to lean toward it, like a flower into the sun. It somehow seemed a safer sort of kindness than the exquisite welcome of the duke and duchess.

  “Oh, I couldn’t have rung. I didn’t want to disturb anyone and the house was so quiet and peaceful and—”

  “ ’Tis no trouble at all to be awakened. Some of us are a bit restless nights, aye, like mice? Shame on ye, Jordy, for botherin’ Miss Danforth.”

  Tansy smiled at that, imagining herself as a mouse, a nightcap perched on her head, a cup of tea in her hand, pacing in front of a tiny hearth in a tiny hole, sleepless. There were times, especially recently, she wouldn’t have minded living her life at the level of the baseboards and having a hole to return to.

  When she wasn’t thoroughly relishing being the focal point of a given room, that was.

  “Jordy didn’t bother me at all! He was just about to tell me where to
find the bread.” She winked at the boy.

  The boy beamed at her, enslaved for life.

  Mrs. deWitt immediately performed what amounted to a ballet of competence, unwrapping a loaf of bread and a half wheel of cheese, hewing generous slices of each, sliding them onto a plate which she slid over to Tansy, along with the jam pot. She pumped water and heaved a kettle up onto the stove, and Tansy almost closed her eyes at the soothing, familiar, homely sound of water coming to a boil.

  “Ye’re here to be wed now, ain’t ye?” Mrs. deWitt said brightly.

  She wasn’t surprised the servants would know all about her. It was the nature of servants everywhere to know such things.

  “I suppose I am.”

  Mrs. deWitt nodded. “The duke, yer cousin, I believe, he be a fine man, the finest.”

  And the scariest, Tansy was tempted to add.

  “I would go to the ends of the earth for that man. The ends of the earth . . .”

  She suspected the cook was trying to reassure her.

  “. . . despite what some may say about him,” she added stoutly. “And don’t you believe a word of it.”

  She knew it.

  “What do they say?” she coaxed casually.

  “And the duchess, our Miss Genevieve, well, she be an angel come to earth,” she said as if she hadn’t heard Tansy at all, which Tansy very much doubted. “A beautiful lady, and so kind and fair.”

  Genevieve—the duchess—was, indeed, beautiful. Petite, black-haired, blue-eyed, radiating a calm intelligence and the serene confidence of one who is certain she is loved, certain she belonged, and who was a part of everything she saw here in Sussex.

  Tansy fought back an irritable little twitch, as if someone had dragged a hand along her pelt in the wrong direction.

  “The duchess is lovely and she’s been all that is amiable and welcoming,” she said. “I am blessed indeed in my relations.”

  Mrs. deWitt beamed at her approvingly. “Tea . . . or . . .” She peered shrewdly at Tansy. “. . . would it be a bit o’ sippin’ chocolate, miss?”

  “Oh, chocolate, please!” Despite herself, she gave a girlish clap.

  A few moments of bustling later a cup of steaming chocolate was thunked in front of her, and Mrs. deWitt prodded Jordy with a toe because his head was lolling, before thunking her own solid behind in a chair across from Tansy.

  “Thank you so much, Mrs. deWitt. It was just what I wanted.”

  Miss deWitt’s smile was triumphant. “I knew it! I know a girl who likes chocolate, m’dear. The prettiest ones do.”

  Tansy felt her pride settle into place again. “Have you worked for the Eversea family long?”

  “I’ve known Miss Genevieve—Her Grace—since she was a wee thing. She was Miss Genevieve Eversea then. Mind ye, now, Genevieve is a beauty, but she’s always been quietlike; ye be pretty as an angel yerself,” the cook hastened to reassure.

  “So I’ve been tol’—er, that is, you’re much too kind.”

  Tansy rotated her cup of chocolate on the table abstractedly, then stopped. She prided herself on her ability to remain in control of any circumstance, whether it was a ballroom flirtation or an Italian shouting “forsake” up at the window, or reading a message about a carriage accident while the messenger, a curious stranger, looked on and waited for her to regain her ability to speak and breathe and to find a shilling to pay him for delivering the news of the end of her world.

  “But ’tis the duchess’s sister, Miss Olivia . . . talk about a beauty! She does have a way of turning men into fools for her. And she’ll make a grand, grand match, too.”

  Tansy’s pride yanked at its tether. She was used to stopping conversation when she entered a ballroom. She was used to dropping jaws. Can you do that, Olivia Eversea?

  It seemed an awfully long time since she’d been in a ballroom.

  “Miss Genevieve spoke so affectionately of her brothers and sisters.”

  “Oh, aye. There’s Master Marcus, married to Louisa, and Colin, settled and raising cattle but no babies yet. Miss Olivia, she may be married to a very grand viscount before the year is out, at long last, bless her poor sore heart. And then there’s Master Ian . . . Ah, goodness, that is quite a bright moon out the window!” she said abruptly.

  Tansy swiveled her head. It was bright, all right, but such was the nature of the moon.

  She half suspected the distraction was deliberate. Who had Mrs. deWitt just mentioned? Someone who hadn’t been mentioned by either the duke or the duchess earlier today, she was certain of that.

  The cook appeared to have abandoned that thread of thought. “ ’Twill be a simple thing for a young lady such as yerself to make a splendid match. Perhaps even as fine as Miss Genevieve.”

  She wished people would cease talking about her as if she were simply a shoe missing a mate. If it were that easy, surely she would even now be exchanging meaningful world-excluding looks of her own with one of those smitten swains from New York? Many of them had vowed eternal love, and many of them were at least as handsome as poor Giancarlo, and one of them had kissed her, because he was bold and she’d dared him. She had liked it, and stopped it immediately because she possessed more sense than her father had no doubt credited her.

  Apart from an accelerated pulse, there really had been no consequence. He hadn’t captured the whole of her imagination, let alone her heart, for more than a day. And she was certain the man she married should be able to capture both.

  Fortunately, she’d made a list of requirements for a husband. She thought the duke would find it helpful.

  “You flatter me, surely, Mrs. deWitt,” she said.

  Mrs. deWitt turned to look at Tansy, speculation written over her soft features. She studied her a moment.

  Then she surprised Tansy by reaching over and patting her hand, a familiarity perhaps brought on by the fact that they were all wearing night robes.

  “Dinna ye worry about a thing, Miss Danforth.”

  It was probably a platitude, but it felt, in the dark kitchen, with Jordy somnolently turning the haunch at a soothing rhythm, that Mrs. deWitt had seen into her soul. Suddenly Tansy’s throat tightened and her eyes began to burn.

  Probably just the steam from the chocolate.

  Chapter 3

  THE NIGHT WAS JUST beginning to give way to dawn when Tansy’s eyes popped open.

  The cloudlike mattress beneath her wasn’t swaying with the motion of the sea. The elegantly furnished room was all slim lines and dark woods and gilt and shades of blue. Not America. Not a ship. Sussex. Pennyroyal Green, to be precise.

  A stripe of inviting rosy light was pushing its way through a crack between the curtains.

  She drowsily slid out of bed, rubbed her fists in her eyes, heaved her heavy braid over one shoulder and followed the road like the road to certainty across the deep Savonnerie carpet.

  She gently grabbed a fistful of the curtains, which were gold velvet and soft as kittens, and peered out the window.

  The horizon lay before her in strata of colors: first the soft manicured green of the Eversea parklands, above that a dark line of trees both fluffy and pointy, which must be a forest, beyond that a broad expanse of darker green, mounded like a tossed blanket, of what had to be the Sussex downs, and finally a narrow strip of silver. Probably the sea.

  The sky was just taking on a maidenly blush. She watched as the rising sun gilded mundane things one by one, as if allotting each of them a turn at glory. First a tall, neat shrubbery, then a white stone bench, then a fountain, then a man—

  She sucked in her breath so quickly she nearly choked.

  A bare man.

  Bare from the waist up, anyway.

  He was standing on the little balcony next to hers, just feet away.

  She ducked back into her room and dragged the curtain over her face, leaving ju
st her eyes exposed, like a harem girl, and leaned forward for a better look. She could only see his back: a glorious burnished expanse of shoulders, a lovely trench of sorts along his spine, dividing two ridges of hard muscle, all of that narrowing into a taut waist.

  Suddenly he thrust his arms up into the air, arched backward as though he’d been struck by lightning, and made a sort of roaring sound, like a pagan god calling down the morning. Though she doubted whether a god would sport fluffy black hair in his armpits.

  He promptly disappeared back into his room, just as though he’d been a cuckoo popping out of a clock to announce the time.

  His roar still echoed faintly.

  All in all, not an inauspicious start to a day.

  She climbed back into bed. If it was a dream, she wanted it to continue.

  CAPTAIN CHARLES “CHASE” Eversea swept into the Pig & Thistle, seized a chair, turned it around backward, straddled it, reached for Colin’s ale and took a gulp before lifting a hand to call over Polly Hawthorne, the Pig & Thistle’s barmaid.

  “Thank you,” he said belatedly, gravely, to Colin, dragging the back of his hand over his mouth.

  Colin scowled but it was more a formality than indignation. Of them, Chase was older, Colin the youngest, and the Eversea brother hierarchy was an unshakable thing. He wouldn’t even dream of protesting.

  “Is . . . regular sitting passé now, Chase?” Colin asked mildly. “Afraid you can’t hold your increasingly aged torso up without the assistance of a chair back?”

  “His baubles have grown three sizes now that the East India company has promoted him,” Ian said. “He needs the additional support.”

  “If you accept that position with the company offered to you in London, you, too, can have enormous baubles, Ian. When did you get home?”

  “Late last night. Too late for my own room to be ready, apparently, as I’m ensconced on the third floor. Rode in from London. And you know my plans, and not even the lure of a bauble-swelling promotion will change them. I’ll be gone soon enough. You’ll just have to savor my presence while you can.” He’d mapped out five ports of call, and he finally had precisely enough money saved—through scrimping and clever investments—to do it. China, India, Africa, Brazil. He’d pored over his map of the world so often, sometimes he thought it was singed on his retinas. He could see it when he closed his eyes.