Only a Kiss by Mary Balogh

4

The earl’s apartments, as might have been expected, had the place of honor at the center front of the upper story of the house. They afforded the best view of any room—a panoramic prospect across lawns and flower beds to a band of gorse bushes and cliffs and the sea below stretching to infinity. It was a truly magnificent sight.

It turned Percy’s knees weak with sheer terror.

His bedchamber was also damp, he discovered the first night when he lay down upon noticeably soggy sheets. The housekeeper was horrified and mystified and apologetic. She had checked the sheets with her own hands before they were put upon his bed, she assured his lordship, and so had her ladyship. But damp they now were, and she could not deny the evidence when confronted with it.

“Perhaps,” Percy suggested, “it is the mattress itself that is damp.”

Mattress and sheets and blankets were changed by one hefty footman and an army of maids, all of whom had no doubt been rousted out of their beds so that their master might sleep without drowning.

And there was also, Percy discovered when he threw back the curtains from the windows before lying down upon his newly made-up bed, a great V of soggy dampness on the wallpaper below the windowsill. A bit mysterious, he thought, since he had not encountered any rain during his journey and had not noticed that patch earlier.

The sun was sparkling off the sea the next morning when Percy got out of bed and gingerly looked out. The water was calm. Both sea and sky were a clear blue—at last. It all appeared very benevolent, in fact, and the expanse of the park between the house and the cliffs looked reassuringly broad. It would surely take all of five minutes to walk from the house to those gorse bushes. Nevertheless, he wished his rooms were at the back of the house, facing those solid rocks.

The damp patch below the windowsill appeared considerably less damp this morning, he noticed.

He could hear Watkins pottering in his dressing room and ran a hand over the rough stubble on his jaw. It was time to face the day. He grimaced slightly, though, at the prospect. One would have thought that at some time during the past two years someone would have thought of mentioning that the late earl had died in possession of a resident spinster sister and a widowed daughter-in-law. And there was the sharp-tongued cousin, mercifully unrelated to him, who spoke in a baritone voice that might cause one to mistake her for a man if one could not see her. And there were the animals . . .

He longed suddenly for the sanity of his London home and White’s Club and his familiar friends and . . . boredom. But he had no one but himself to blame.

He had breakfast with Lady Lavinia and Mrs. Ferby. The former explained what she thought must be the exact relationship between them from what he had told them last evening. They had clearly shared a great-great-grandfather, even though their relative ages would lead anyone to assume they were a generation apart. Cousin Percy was Lady Lavinia’s third cousin. Dicky, her late brother’s son, would have been his third cousin once removed. Therefore, Imogen was his third cousin-in-law once removed.

The lady in question did not put in an appearance. She was, Percy assumed, a late riser.

“Dicky!” Mrs. Ferby said, addressing the food on her plate. “He was Richard, was he not, Lavinia? I am surprised he did not rebel against such an infantile name.” She paused in her eating and fixed Percy with a glare. “I suppose you are Percival?”

“I am, ma’am,” he agreed.

“The only time my husband addressed me as Addy,” she said, “was also the last time. He died seven months after I married him.”

Percy did not ask if there was a connection between the two incidents.

“I was seventeen,” she added, “and he was fifty-three. It was not a May/September match. It was more like a January/December mismatch.”

Her brief marriage, Percy concluded, had not been of the variety made in heaven, though he guessed Mr. Ferby might well have been quite happy to retire there after seven months with his young bride.

Lady Lavinia offered to show him to the morning room after breakfast, on the assumption, he supposed, that he might wish to put his feet up there and enjoy his existence before a roaring fire. It was a large chamber and was what he would call the library, though it did admittedly face east and therefore caught the morning sun. There was an impressive array of books shelved there. He would enjoy browsing through them at another time.

Two cats were lying at their ease before the windows, each in a shaft of warm sunlight. Wise cats. The great lump of a bulldog had taken ownership of the rug before the fire and was stretched out there, apparently asleep. The spindly dog of the bulging eyes was cowering under an oak desk but scrambled out when he saw Percy to wave his tail and gaze upward with abject hope. Percy trained his quizzing glass upon it and ordered it to sit. He might as well have asked it to perform a pirouette on the pointed toes of one paw.

He was going to have to do something about those strays, Percy thought for at least the dozenth time since yesterday afternoon.

He did not stay. At his request, Lady Lavinia took him to the steward’s office at the back of the house and left him in the hands of Ratchett, who looked to be eighty if he was a day and every bit as dusty as the mountain of estate and account books that were piled everywhere, including on the top of his desk.

The man bobbed his bald head several times—or was it merely that he had the shakes?—and squinted in the general direction of Percy’s left ear. He indicated the dusty piles and expressed himself of the opinion that his lordship must be desirous of spending the day going through them. His lordship desired no such thing. But looking thoughtfully at his good and faithful servant, who had not once looked directly into his face, he made the instant decision not to ask the man to take him about the estate in person.

He needed to do something about the strays and the ancient steward, he thought. And the butler was a bit on the creaky side too.

“Some other time, perhaps,” he said. “I plan to spend the rest of the morning wandering about outside, seeing what is what.” Which was admittedly a vague sort of plan.

And then, just as he was about to sally forth into the outdoors, he was waylaid by the butler, who informed him mournfully that the earl’s bedchamber had always been more subject to damp than any other room in the house, though it was worse now than it had been in his late lordship’s day. He would see to it personally that his lordship was moved to the roomiest of the guest rooms at the rear of the house.

It was exactly what Percy had wanted. Had the offer been made yesterday, before he retired to bed for the night, he might have accepted it gladly. But . . . well, his servants could jolly well make the room habitable. He had not made many demands upon them for two full years, had he?

“No need to bother,” he said. “But see that a fire is lit in there and kept burning.”

The butler inclined his head and creaked forward to open the front doors.

Percy stepped out and took a few deep breaths of the sea air, which was brisk to say the least. He went down the steps and strode out across the lawn in a roughly westerly direction. But leaving doors open in the house must be a habit, he concluded a minute later when he realized that the dog was following him—the spindly one, which must have been very close to the point of terminal starvation when Lady Lavinia took pity on it. It did not look firmly established in the land of the living even now.

“It is like this,” Percy said, stopping and speaking with some exasperation. “Hector, is it? I have never heard a more unsuitable name in all my life. It is like this, Hector. I intend to walk, to stride, to cover distance. If you are foolish enough to follow, I shall not waste energy trying to prevent you. I shall not stop to wait for you if you should falter, nor will I carry you if you should find yourself exhausted and stranded far from the house and your feeding bowl. And, while on the subject of feeding, I have no doggie treats about my person. Not a one. Is that clearly understood?”

The pathetic apology for a doggie tail waved halfheartedly and, when Percy turned to stride onward, Hector trotted after him.

Perhaps he understood ancient Greek.

The park was pleasantly set up and probably made an impressive enough foreground for the house itself during the summer, when the grass would be greener and the trees would have leaves and flowers would be blooming in the beds. Its chief attraction for most people, of course, would be its position high on a cliff top with unobstructed views of endless expanses of sea. Some people—most people, actually—were funny that way. A couple of the flower beds here had been artfully situated in hollows, where they would be sheltered from the winds. Wrought-iron seats had been placed in them, presumably so that the beholder could enjoy the flowers without having either his hat or his head blown off.

The wall that surrounded the park on three sides was built of stones of all sizes and shapes and no mortar or anything else to bind them together, he noticed with interest. It was all held in place by the skill of the builder in matching one stone to another and . . . But he did not understand how it was done so that the whole thing did not simply collapse as soon as the builder’s back was turned. He must ask someone.

Over the west wall he could see the beginnings of a valley, though he could not see what was down there. Farmland, presumably his own, stretched away to the north. Most of the fields he could see were dotted with sheep and lots of them, but there was nothing that looked like a cultivated field. It was only February, of course.

He wondered why the estate apparently prospered so little. Perhaps he would try to find out. Or perhaps he would not bother. How could anyone stand to live here? He would expire of boredom in no time at all—which, come to think of it, was exactly what he had been doing in London too. Perhaps boredom had less to do with a place than with the person who felt it. Now there was a lowering thought.

He considered following the wall around to the north, behind the outcropping of rock at the back of the house, so that he could see more of his land. But the going looked rugged, and he turned instead to follow a footpath leading southward along the inside of the wall, even though he realized that every step was bringing him closer to the edge of the cliffs. Before he reached them, however, he came to a house in the southwest corner of the park, nestled cozily in a hollow and surrounded on three sides, like the main house itself on a smaller scale, by high rocks and bushes. It was a house without a roof. Or, at least, it had the frame of a roof, but not the covering that would keep the elements out. It did not take much power of deduction to conclude that this must be the dower house, Lady Barclay’s home—his third cousin-in-law once removed. There were two men up on the rafters. One of them was hammering while the other stood and watched.

Percy strode forward. The house looked square and solid and reasonably well sized. He guessed there were at least four bedchambers, perhaps six, upstairs, and several rooms downstairs. There was a neat garden, bordered on the east, the unsheltered side, by a low box hedge. A rustic wooden gate in the middle of it opened onto a straight path leading to the front door.

Percy stopped outside the gate. The two men had seen him approach. The hammering had stopped.

“How is the work progressing?” he called up.

Both men pulled at their forelocks, bobbed their heads, and said nothing. Perhaps they understood ancient Greek?

“It is progressing,” a cool, velvet voice said, and its owner stepped into sight from beside the house, a basket of what looked like weeds over one arm, a small trowel in her other hand. Presumably weeds grew in February, even if flowers did not.

She was wearing the gray cloak and bonnet again, though the cloak had been pushed back over her shoulders to reveal a plain blue dress. Plain suited her. He had discovered yesterday that she had an excellent figure. It was not voluptuous, but there were curves in all the right places, and everything was in perfect proportion to her height. She had long legs, which he might have considered interesting if she had held any sexual appeal for him. He had never fancied the idea of making love to marble. It sounded chilly.

Her hair too was more appealing without the bonnet. It was thick and shiny and smooth and simply styled. He guessed that it was straight—and long. But he did not entertain any fantasies of running his fingers through it.

“It would proceed much faster if there were more men up there,” he said. “Or if the two of them worked in tandem rather than one at a time. I will have a word with Ratchett. That roof needs to be on before the weather produces something nasty.”

“You will do no such thing,” she told him, her eyebrows halfway up her forehead. “My cottage has nothing to do with Mr. Ratchett. Or you.”

He looked deliberately about him as he clasped his hands behind his back. The dog, he noticed, was still with him, and was now sitting at his feet like a faithful hound.

“Is this or is it not my land?” he asked her. He looked at the building. “And my house? Are not repairs to my property my concern and my expense? Is Ratchett or is he not my steward?”

That last point, actually, might be questionable.

“By law,” she said, “it is yours, of course. In reality it is mine. I am entitled to live here as the daughter-in-law of the late earl and the widow of his only son. Its upkeep is my responsibility and my expense.”

He looked steadily at her, and she looked steadily back.

An impasse.

Were not such arguments usually the reverse of this one? Ought they not to be scrapping over who should not pay for the repairs?

“We will see,” he said.

“Yes, we will,” she agreed.

They certainly were rubbing each other the wrong way. He was quite unaccustomed to having adversarial relationships with women. Or with anyone, in fact. He was usually the most amiable of mortals. Perhaps she resented the fact that he had inherited from her father-in-law. She must have married the late Dicky in the full expectation that she would be Lady Hardford of Hardford Hall one day. It must be a nasty comedown to be a dependent widow instead, with only the less illustrious courtesy title to call her own, and to be living in a modest house in one obscure corner of the park.

“Back to work,” he said, raising his eyes to the roof, where the two men were gawking downward, interested spectators of the altercation going on below. “Lady Barclay, can I persuade you to abandon your weeding in order to walk with me?”

Perhaps they could take a step back and start over again. He regretted the way he had greeted her yesterday—and who the devil might you be? It was not surprising that she resented him, especially when her husband ought to have owned the property he himself had ignored for all of two years. But what could she expect when the man had abandoned her in order to go dashing off to Portugal and Spain to play at war?

She considered his offer, looking at him the whole while. Then she pulled off her gloves, which apparently had been donned for her gardening, set them on top of the weeds in her basket with the trowel, set the basket beside the front steps of the house, and pulled her cloak back over her shoulders. Another pair of gloves appeared from a pocket.

“Yes,” she said.

“You must resent me,” he told her as they set off east along the cliff path, which, he realized too late, was uncomfortably close to the edge of the cliffs themselves, cut off from the park by the thick hedge of gorse bushes. And, being a gentleman, he was forced to walk on the outside.

“Must I?”

“You expected your husband to be in my place,” he said. “You expected to be the countess.”

“If I did,” she said, “I have had plenty of time in which to adjust my expectations. My husband has been dead for longer than eight years.”

“Eight?” he said. “Yet you have not remarried?”

“And you have not married?” she asked in return. At first it seemed like a non sequitur, but then he understood the point she was making.

“It is surely different for a woman,” he said.

“Why?” she asked. “Because a woman cannot function in life without a man to protect her and order her life for her?”

“Is that what your husband did?” he asked. “Order your life? Did he leave you to go off to war and order you to stay behind, playing the part of patient, dutiful wife while you awaited his return?”

“Dicky was my friend,” she told him. “My dearest friend. We were equal companions. He did not leave me behind when he went to war. He took me with him. No, correction. I went with him. I was with him to the end.”

“Ah, a woman who followed the drum,” he said, turning his head to look at her. Yes, he could imagine it. This was a woman who would not wilt under harsh conditions or flinch in the face of danger. “Admirable. He died in battle, did he?”

She was staring straight ahead, her chin raised. Gulls were screeching about somewhere below the level of his feet. He found it a mite disturbing.

“He died in captivity,” she said. “He was a reconnaissance officer. A spy.”

Ah, poor devil. But were not captured officers treated with dignity and honor and courtesy, provided they gave their parole—that is, their promise as gentlemen not to try to escape? Unless, that was, they were out of uniform when caught, as a reconnaissance officer might well have been. He would not ask. He did not want to know. But—

“You were with him to the end?” He frowned.

“I went partway into the hills with him at the start of that particular mission,” she said, “as I often did when it was deemed safe enough. His batman would have escorted me back. We were still well behind our own lines. We were both captured.”

“And the batman?”

“He was foraging for firewood at the time,” she said, “and was able to make his escape.”

One captive had survived and one had not. Suddenly he saw her marble demeanor in a wholly new light. What had happened to her during her captivity? Especially if her husband had not been in uniform? It was really too ghastly to think about and he was not going to do it. He certainly was not going to ask any more questions. He did not want to know.

“And so you returned to England alone,” he said. “Did you move immediately to the dower house?”

“I went home,” she said, “to my father’s house twenty miles from here. But I would not speak or sleep or leave my room. Or eat. My mother is a cousin of the Duke of Stanbrook. He lives at Penderris Hall on the eastern side of Cornwall. He had opened his home to military officers who had returned from the wars severely wounded in one way or another, and he had hired a skilled physician and other people to nurse them. My mother wrote to him out of despair, and he came to fetch me. I was there for three years. There were six of us who stayed that long, seven counting George—the duke, that is. We called ourselves the Survivors’ Club. We still do. We still get together for three weeks of every year during March.”

They had stopped walking. There was a break in the cliff face here, he noticed, and what appeared to be a zigzagging path down to the beach below—a rather steep and surely dangerous descent. The dog sat down beside him, its head against the side of Percy’s boot.

“When one imagines oneself striding about one’s land, faithful hound at heel,” he said, “one tends to picture a robust and intelligent sheepdog or some such.”

She looked at Hector. “Perhaps,” she said, “when a dog imagines following upon the heels of its master, it pictures kind words and a gentle touch.”

Touché. She had a wicked tongue.

“I am not its master,” he said.

“Ah,” she said, “but who gets to choose?”

“Three years,” he said. “You were at Penderris for three years?”

Good God! How damaged had she been? And why was he pursuing this line of questioning? He did not deal in darkness. He hoped she would answer with a simple monosyllable or not at all.

“Ben—Sir Benedict Harper—had his legs shattered and refused to have them amputated,” she said. “Vincent, Viscount Darleigh, was blinded in his first battle at the age of seventeen, and deafened too at first. Ralph, Duke of Worthingham, was hacked almost to ribbons with a saber when he was unseated from his horse in a cavalry charge. Flavian, Viscount Ponsonby, was shot in the head and then fell on it from his horse. Hugo, Lord Trentham, was not wounded at all. He sustained not even a scratch, though he had led a Forlorn Hope that killed almost all his men and severely wounded those few who survived. He went out of his mind. George did not even go to war, but his only son did and died, and then his wife jumped to her death over the cliffs at the edge of his estate. And I . . . ? I was present when my husband died, but they did not kill me. Yes, three years. And those men are my very dearest friends in this world.”

Percy found himself fondling Hector’s damaged ear and wishing again that he had not started this. Shattered legs.Blind at the age of seventeen—and deaf too.Sons dying and wives committing suicide—over the edge of a cliff. And what the devil had happened to Lady Barclay while her husband was in captivity, presumably being tortured? It was something ghastly enough that she had spent three years at Penderris Hall. He felt a trickle of sweat snake down his spine. He did not want to know.

“When I left Penderris,” she said, “I came here. My father had died during those three years, my mother had gone to live with her sister, my aunt, in Cumberland, my brother had taken my father’s place with his wife and children, and I did not think it fair to go there, though my sister-in-law very graciously invited me. I could not bear to live in the hall here with my father-in-law and Aunt Lavinia, even though more than three years had gone by. I asked for the dower house, and my father-in-law reluctantly allowed me to go there. That is my story, Lord Hardford. You were entitled to hear it since you have come here for however short a time to find me living on your land. Shall we go down onto the beach?”

“Down there?” he asked sharply. “No.”

She turned her head to look steadily at him.

“I have never seen the attraction of beaches,” he said—well, not for a long time, anyway. “They are just a lot of sand and water. Why is Hardford not more prosperous than it is? Or do you not know?”

“It pays its way,” she said. “At least, that is what my father-in-law was always fond of saying.”

“It does,” he agreed. “And he was content with that?”

She turned her face away and did not answer immediately.

“He was never a particularly ambitious man,” she said. “Dicky used to get impatient with him. He had all sorts of ideas and plans, but they were never implemented. He decided that the military life would be a better outlet for his energy. I believe his father lost all heart after Dicky died.”

“And Ratchett?” he asked. “Was he ever an efficient steward?”

“Maybe once upon a time,” she said. “My father-in-law inherited him.”

“And he never considered that it might be time to put the man out to pasture and hire someone more . . . vigorous?” Percy was frowning. And he was wishing with all his heart that he could go back to the night of his birthday and erase the sudden drunken impulse to come to Cornwall. Sometimes what one did not know was best left that way.

“I doubt he ever considered it,” she said. “Mr. Ratchett keeps very neat and orderly books. He spends his days surrounded by them and makes new entries in them as needed. If you wish to know anything concerning rents and crops and flocks or anything else on the estate for the past forty or fifty years, you will surely find the answer in meticulous detail within those pages.”

“I feel rather, Lady Barclay,” he said impatiently, “as though I had stepped into a different universe.”

“I suppose,” she said, “the situation is reversible. You could go back to where you—” She stopped abruptly.

... where you came from?

... where you belong?

“And leave that house, my house, to be turned into a menagerie?” he asked. “Do you realize that eventually, if Lady Lavinia continues to add every stray who is canny enough to wander up to the doors—and word must be spreading fast in the animal kingdom—eventually the house is going to become uninhabitable by humans? That it will be hopelessly coated with dog and cat hair? That it will smell?”

“You would have them turned away to starve, then?” she asked.

“It is not possible to feed all the hungry of this world,” he said.

“Aunt Lavinia does not even try to take on the world’s woes,” she told him. “She merely feeds the hungry who come to her door—to your door.”

He felt a sudden suspicion. “Are we talking just about dogs and cats?” he asked.

“There are people,” she said, “who cannot find work for one reason or another.”

He stopped in his tracks again and looked at her, appalled. “If I were to wander into the nether regions of the house,” he said, “or into the stables, I would find all the maimed and criminally inclined vagabonds of the world eating me out of house and home, would I?”

One of the maids who had come to make up his bed last night had been lame and looked as if she might be a bit simpleminded too.

“Not all,” she said. “And those you would find are usefully employed and earning the food for which you pay. More gardeners and stable hands were needed by the time my father-in-law died, and the indoor staff had grown rather sparse. Aunt Lavinia has a tender heart, but she was never able to give it room while her brother lived. He was content with life as it had always been. He disliked change more and more as he grew older and after he lost Dicky.”

“One of these strays is, I suppose, Mrs. Ferby,” he said. “Cousin Adelaide, who is not under any circumstances to be called Addie.”

“I suppose you were given an account at breakfast of the seven-month marriage, were you?” she said. “She has to live upon the charity of her relatives since she has almost no private means, and Aunt Lavinia convinced herself that bringing a companion to the house was the respectable thing to do after she was left alone. Perhaps she was even right. And her chosen companion is a relative.”

“Not of mine,” he said testily. “I can understand why you would rather I went back to where I came from, Lady Barclay.”

“Well, you do seem to have managed very well without Hardford Hall for the past two years,” she said. “Now, having come here on what seems to be some sort of whim, you have whipped yourself into a thoroughly bad temper. Why not go away and forget about our peculiar ways and be sweet-tempered again?”

“A thoroughly bad temper?”The dog whimpered and cowered at his feet. “You have not seen me in a bad temper, ma’am.”

“It must be a very disagreeable sight, then,” she said. “And like all bad-tempered men, you have a tendency to turn your wrath upon the wrong person. I am not the one who has neglected Hardford and the farms belonging to it. I am not the one who has filled the house with strays without a clear plan for what to do with them. I am not the one who brought Cousin Adelaide here as a companion, with the full knowledge that she will remain here for the rest of her life. Under normal circumstances, I mind my own business in my own house and make no demands upon the estate or anyone on it.”

“The most abhorrent type of person on this earth,” he said, narrow eyed, “is the one who remains cool and reasonable when being quarreled with. Are you always cool, Lady Barclay? Are you always like a block of marble?”

She raised her eyebrows.

“And now see what you have done,” he told her. “You have provoked me into unpardonable rudeness. Again. I am never rude. I am usually all sweetness and charm.”

“That is because you are usually in a different universe,” she said, “one that revolves about you. The Peninsula was full of rude, blustering officers who believed other people had been created to pay them homage. I always thought they were merely silly and best ignored.”

And she turned, the baggage, and began walking back the way they had come. She did not look behind her to see if he was following. He was not. He stood where he was, his arms folded over his chest, until she was out of earshot. Then he looked down at the dog.

“If there is a type of woman that grates upon my every nerve more than any other,” Percy said, “it is the type that always has to have the last word. Rude and blustering. Silly.SILLY! ‘I always thought they were best ignored.’ For two pins I would go straight to the stables, mount my horse, and set its head for London. Forget about this ungodly place. Let you and all your playmates overrun the house until it is derelict. Let the earl’s apartments turn to mildew. Let that steward turn into a fossil in his dusty office. Leave Lady Lavinia Hayes alone with her cousin and her bleeding heart. Let that marble pillar beggar herself with the bill for her roof and all the other repairs that are bound to be needed. Let the tide ebb and flow against the cliffs until eternity wears them away and both houses fall off.”

Hector had no opinion to offer, and there was no point in Percy’s standing here, pointlessly venting his frustration as he watched the cause of it recede into the distance.

“At least then I would not find myself babbling nonsense to a dog,” he said. “I suppose you have exhausted yourself, though if you have it is entirely your own fault. You cannot say I did not warn you. And I suppose you are ready for your dinner so that you can build up some fat to hide those bones from sight. Come, then. What are you waiting for?”

He looked for a gap in the gorse bushes and found one that would leave only a few surface scratches on his boots as he pushed through it—Watkins would look tragically stoic. But as he stepped into the gap, he looked back at the dog, scowled at it, and stooped to lift it over the prickly barrier, hoping as he did so that no one could see him. He set off grimly across the lawn in the direction of the house.

At least, he thought—at least he was not feeling bored. Though it did occur to him that boredom was perhaps not such a sad state after all.