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‘You appear to be an even darker horse than I thought you, Laughraine,’ he said slowly. ‘Oh, well met, Sir Gideon, and how d’you do?’ he added mockingly.
‘Well enough, but I’ll never understand you if I live to be a hundred, Winterley,’ Gideon said with a manly shrug. ‘Ours has never been a conventional marriage,’ he added casually, as if he and Callie kept it to themselves out of a perverse delight in secrets. Since she was the one to demand it came to an end nine years ago, she could hardly complain if he was making weak excuses for that deception now.
‘Then perhaps you should consult with your wife and match up your stories better in future. I wish you both a good morning and hope to see you at dinner. If you dine together as man and wife and not under your chosen aliases in different counties, of course?’
‘Then you are staying at Raigne?’ Gideon asked as if it confirmed his worst fears.
‘Lord Laughraine will invite me, d’you see? This time I rashly agreed to stay for a week or two to escape the husband hunters, since the little darlings will go to Brighton on Prinny’s coattails to carry on their craft out of season. Like a gullible innocent up from the country I agreed to his latest invitation to enjoy some bucolic tranquillity at his expense and quite forgot he was a great friend of Virgil and Virginia’s. Although given what has happened so far this year, I should feel less of a fool now I’m looking at the very good reason he wants me there, shouldn’t I?’ Mr Winterley said mysteriously.
Callie supposed Gideon knew what the man meant, since she felt him flinch and heard a bitten-back curse. The only Virgil and Virginia she knew of were the last Lord and Lady Farenze; Gideon’s late grandfather and his wife. Still with that look of unholy amusement in his eyes, Mr Winterley blithely gave them both a seated bow before wishing them a genial farewell. Then he rode off as if he’d happened on an amusing sideshow at precisely the right moment to enliven a tedious moment.
‘Who on earth is that?’ she asked.
‘A friend, although you wouldn’t think so at times,’ Gideon replied tersely.
‘A friend you were about to call to account for simply exchanging greetings with me?’ she reminded him recklessly.
‘I have no patience with Winterley’s sort of politeness. You should be wary of him, too, Callie. He’s slippery as an eel and about as trustworthy as a fox.’
‘Maybe it takes a rogue to know one.’
She tied the trailing strings of her bonnet into a militant bow she regretted as soon as the close-woven straw closed the heat in and threatened to make her head ache. Refusing to undo it after making such a grand gesture, she silently dared him to comment.
‘There’s no maybe about it,’ he said with an unrepentant grin and they resumed their journey in what she hoped was a dignified silence.
‘I have no wish to know what you have been doing while my back was turned,’ she managed to lie after they had continued for half a mile with her staring everywhere but at his face. An internal picture of a parade of his lovers kept plaguing her, as if a grey mist had settled on her shoulders in the most unlikely cloud and was blighting a glorious morning.
He sighed as if she were proving to be the most exasperating of travelling companions and answered the question she had been trying so hard not to ask ever since he came back into her life. ‘No, Callie, I don’t have a mistress, nor a discreet married lover bored with her husband after filling his nursery with heirs. I’ve been celibate as a monk for lack of you, but you’d be sensible to wish I was busy chasing every strumpet in town right now. You’re right to watch me as if I’m a starving wolf about to swallow you down in one hungry bite, so maybe you’d best avoid provoking me with the likes of James Winterley again. I want you so badly every inch of me is on fire and at least now you can’t say you haven’t had fair warning.’
‘No man who loves as passionately as you could go nigh on a decade without a woman,’ she said sceptically, the image coming into her head of him in the arms of some sensual charmer purring with pleasure at his splendid body and skilful lovemaking.
‘I am a married man, in case you had forgotten,’ he said shortly.
She tried to shrug off the doubts that made her want to smack the smile off that smug imaginary siren’s face, but he was a fully adult man and she couldn’t seem to get reason to overcome jealousy now they were side by side and she had felt the flex and steel of his body next to hers for mile after mile. Perhaps she should have agreed to travel in the stuffy carriage away from him, after all.
‘You revelled in being my lover, then my wife, before you decided I was a villain and you hated me. Don’t pretend you don’t want me nigh as much as I want you.’
‘You taught me not to trust my one and only lover, Gideon,’ she said as images of them locked in the wilder excesses of passion threatened to leave her certainty she never wanted to risk loving him again in the dust.
‘This isn’t the time or place for picking at old wounds,’ he warned with a significant nod back at the carriage where Biddy was fanning herself in the growing heat and beginning to look as if she regretted choosing that seat over this one. ‘I won’t admit to something I didn’t do, though,’ he added in a low, driven voice.
‘I don’t want to love you again, Gideon,’ she warned. She was breathless and on the edge of something dangerous and had to protect herself from being so vulnerable again.
‘Maybe I won’t ask you to,’ he replied flatly, before halting the carriage and insisting Biddy squeeze into the space atop the graceful little vehicle between them.
* * *
They were close to the end of their journey at last and Callie spotted familiar landmarks and the outlying parts of her grandfather’s former parish. She distracted herself from her galling and petty jealousy of Biddy for her place next to Gideon on the narrow coachman’s seat by wondering who still lived where they were when she left and who had moved on. Inevitably some of the parishioners would have joined her grandfather in the peaceful churchyard of King’s Raigne Church. She winced at the very thought of that grave and knew she had to visit it before very many days had gone by in her temporary home to make peace with the past.
It seemed best to tell herself this was temporary. The very idea of being mistress of such a huge and venerable house one day might terrify her half to death if she dwelt on it. She glanced at her husband over the top of Biddy’s head and knew she would be more open to his persuasion if he wasn’t Lord Laughraine’s heir. Then they could simply return to London when the heat of midsummer died down and live a humdrum life. A sense of justice her grandfather instilled in her argued she must put her dread of the Laughraine inheritance aside and see Gideon as he was, rather than one day lord and master of Raigne.
There, now they were almost through Great Raigne and a particularly strait-laced widow she recognised as an incurable gossip was waiting to cross the road. The lady took a second look at the modest carriage and exactly who was driving it and her mouth fell open like a cod fish.
‘Oh, dear,’ she muttered to Gideon, then summoned up a cheery smile as they swept past as if a Laughraine always drove his own carriage with his wife at his side and a maidservant for company. ‘Our eccentric method of travel will be all round the Raigne villages by the time she’s walked the length of the high street.’
‘I have no intention of keeping our arrival quiet so they might as well get used to us,’ he said, a challenge in his voice she hoped Biddy wouldn’t notice.
‘If your uncle really wants you to stay here and begin to learn the management of the estate we must live here for at least part of the year, though, and Mrs Prosser never did like me,’ Callie said with a sigh.
‘She doesn’t like anybody much, but she does love a title. We should do well on that front.’
Callie stayed silent in deference to Biddy’s eager interest and watched for Raigne’s elaborately carved and twisted Tudor chimney stacks. There they were, as familiar and strange as ever. The sight of the mellow nobleman’s mansion in the distance made her think of her childhood. She had thought it a palace full of exotic things and fairy-tale people. Later she was allowed inside the side door of the giant’s castle at Christmas, when the Sunday School children had tea in the housekeeper’s room and were given a present to take home. Aprons for the girls and shirts for the boys, she recalled with a grimace. If she had any say here she’d make sure children received something more interesting in future.
She wasn’t even through the gates and she was rearranging cherished traditions. It wouldn’t go down well in the servants’ halls if she seemed ready to take over before she had her feet through the door, and she must step carefully if she was to be accepted as a proper wife for an heir to Raigne. The real question being did she want such a role in the first place? Gideon was Lord Laughraine’s acknowledged heir, so she supposed she had no choice as she was Gideon’s wife. She sighed gloomily and wondered how many girls in the Mayfair ballrooms she suspected Gideon was familiar with would give their eye teeth for the position she had no desire for.
Yet King’s Raigne was home in a way Manydown never had been and this was Gideon at her side, as familiar and strange as the world she had left behind when she married him. It felt right to be back in some ways and so wrong in others she could hardly endure to think about it. Under the reproaches he hadn’t made and the sore places in her heart, could they come to love each other in a less overheated and dangerous way than when they were so ridiculously young? They would be fools not to try, so she really had to stop being a fool and step into the future with a little resolution and more hope they would somehow find each other again.
Trying not to dwell on the challenges ahead, lest she jump down from the carriage and run away before they even got to Raigne, she eyed the shady groups of ancient oaks and elms in the parkland they were passing through instead. The sun was high in the sky and cattle were sheltering from it under the wide-spreading trees, lowing to their calves and lazily swishing flies away with their tails. They looked timeless and indifferent to the comings and goings of men and that made her feel better somehow.
‘Welcome to Raigne House, Biddy,’ Gideon said as he drew the horses to a halt on the neatly raked carriage sweep and jumped down to help them down to solid ground.
‘Coo, it’s big, ain’t it, Mr Gideon?’ she said as she stood looking at the place as if it might develop a voice of its own and tell her to go away immediately.
‘True, but it’s also a home.’
‘Not for the likes of me, though, is it?’ she replied, and Callie wondered if it had been fair to bring the girl with her, after all.
‘Come now, Biddy,’ she said bracingly, ‘would you rather have stayed at Cataret House and waited for the next tenant to take over?’
‘Oh, no, miss. I want to stay with you, but people who live in a place like this will know I’m no lady’s maid. You’d better send me round to the kitchens.’
‘No, you took the job I offered and I need you,’ Callie said. ‘You will soon grow into your new tasks, as I must into mine.’
‘If you say so, miss, I mean, my lady,’ Biddy said with a harassed look at the boxes strapped to the back of the coach and another at the great front door as it opened and a very solemn butler came out. ‘Shall I have to unpack for you, my lady?’ she asked before he was close enough to hear.
‘If you please, I don’t want some smart housemaid looking down her nose at my humble wardrobe.’
‘No, of course you don’t, my lady. I suppose there’s books and things about looking after a proper lady’s clothes and whatnots, ain’t there? Someone in this great place will be able to help me with the long words, won’t they? You’ll be far too busy to help me now, but I’m that glad you taught me to read, Miss Sommers because there’s a book about most things, ain’t there?’
‘Of course and that’s a very good notion of yours. I shall send for an appropriate one as soon as I can,’ Callie said soothingly and turned to meet the butler’s stern gaze with nearly as much trepidation as Biddy.
‘I’d love to know what a lady’s whatnots are,’ Gideon whispered, and Callie laughed, then relaxed a little. ‘You were quite right to insist on bringing your protégée with us,’ he added, then turned to meet the ancient retainer as a long-lost friend.
They were conducted upstairs to a vast suite of rooms Callie concluded was the finest guest accommodation in the house. His lordship must have known they were coming because there wasn’t a holland cover to be seen, or a speck of dust on the highly polished furniture and gleaming treasures in this glorious old state room. Gideon seemed to have taken a lot for granted in sending word they were coming before she agreed and she must point that out to him when they were alone again if she wasn’t to develop into a mouse-like woman. Now she had to hide an impulse to follow Gideon into his splendid bedchamber instead of meekly heading for her own, because at least he was familiar in all this stateliness. The loss of him at her side brought back all her fears of losing herself in this vast old barn of a place in more ways than one.
‘There’s a bath being got ready for you in the dressing room yonder, Lady Laughraine,’ Biddy informed her. ‘You ain’t half going to be clean, ain’t you, miss?’ she added, then realised she’d forgotten herself again. ‘Blessed if I’ll ever remember, my lady,’
‘Blessed if I will either, Biddy, now please shake out my best muslin and find a clean chemise and petticoat for me.’
‘Yes, miss. I mean, my lady.’
* * *
‘Don’t leave me alone, will you, Gideon?’ Callie asked an hour later as they met up in their vast sitting room ready to go downstairs and meet her grandfather in his own lair.
‘What, never?’
‘Idiot, I mean until I learn the way of the house, but on the other hand please don’t leave me alone with his lordship, ever.’
‘Difficult, he’s been living for the moment you would agree to see him and make peace.’
‘I can’t see why. I’m a reminder of what should have been if I was born to his daughter-in-law instead of the Vicar’s unwed daughter. He has to be ashamed of me.’
‘No, but he is ashamed of what his son did to you and your mother.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because I asked him about what happened back then and he told me. We have stayed in contact, since I saw no reason to cut myself off from him and he wanted to stay close to you by proxy. Not that I was close to you in any way or could tell him anything about you, since you told me I sickened you and you loathed me with every fibre of your being and never to contact you again.’
‘I didn’t, you know that now, but we must forget what my aunt did before it drives us mad.’
‘I can’t, Callie, any more than I can forgive what she’s done, so please don’t ask that of me next. Suffice it to say, Lord Laughraine and I thought you must be throwing his letters on the fire as well as mine and he’s been too afraid of stirring up a past you found intolerable to ride over and demand you speak to him. He says he and his did enough damage to you and yours, but your aunt must bear a great deal of the blame for all of it, though, don’t you think?’
‘Yes, but does he truly think that?’
‘Which bit are you wondering about being untrue this time?’
‘I deeply regret not suspecting my aunt was destroying my letters and challenging her version of the truth, Gideon, but does his lordship really want to know me?’
‘Of course he does, he’s not the sort of man who judges a child for something they are completely innocent of. I’m a far greater obstacle to Christian forgiveness than you will ever be—he would have every excuse to hate me, given how the succession stands, but he can’t even manage that, so just give him a chance, Callie. I promise you he’s nothing like the ogre you seem to have made of him in your imagination.’
‘I’m beginning to see that. For years I thought he was happy to leave me in ignorance of who I truly was so he didn’t have to admit his son was a rake. I know we weren’t going to talk about Aunt Seraphina, but she does intrude into our lives even now, doesn’t she? Until we understand exactly what she did we can’t forget her. She said my paternal grandfather is as proud as the devil and would never openly acknowledge me, but everything she told me was a lie. Yet the poor man’s heart must sink at the prospect of me as the only source of Laughraine blood left, unless he’s prepared to make an April-and-December marriage and that doesn’t seem likely as he’s been a widower for over twenty years, does it?’
‘No, he was devoted to his wife and seems genuinely happy for us to inherit Raigne one day between us.’
‘Who says there can be an us? I’m not sure I can do it again, Gideon,’ she asked, panicked by the certainty if she was left alone with him too long she would make a fool of herself and beg to be his true wife again.
‘Not yet, maybe, but one day I hope to change your mind. Meanwhile I’m not made of stone, despite your obvious belief to the contrary.’
‘You must be, if you really haven’t had a mistress all the years we’ve been apart.’
‘We’re back to that again, are we? Very well, if it makes you feel better I’ll swear on anything you ask me to that I’m telling the truth. I’ve been on the rack for you, Callie. In the early days I often couldn’t sleep for the lack of you in my bed and at my side. I daydreamed about making love to you when I should have been slaving at my books and stayed working at my first and mostly hopeless cases late into the night because I hated going back to a place I couldn’t call a home without you in it. I can’t count the number of times I set out to find you because I couldn’t stand being alone any longer. Then I’d remember the last weeks when you wouldn’t even share a room with me and that infernal letter you say now that you never sent and it would strip me of any hopes or dreams and I’d go back to my law books and do my best to pretend living without you wasn’t hell on earth. All I had left of you was those vows to be faithful only unto you and I kept them,’ he ended defiantly and no doubt he had, after they parted, since he looked as if the emptiness of those years had been punishment enough for any man’s sins.
‘I’m sorry for all those wicked, wicked lies she told using my name,’ Callie said lamely, reeling at a sight of her wild and passionate young lover fully alive under the cool facade he used to keep the world at bay. ‘We were good friends, once upon a time, though, weren’t we, Gideon? Perhaps we could be so again,’ she added clumsily.
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