Only a Kiss by Mary Balogh

9

Imogen moved back to the dower house the following morning. The work on the roof was not quite finished and the upper floor was a mess—the furniture that had been left up there was draped with Holland covers and coated with dust and debris. The lower floor was crowded with much of the upstairs furniture. The house had not been heated or cleaned for two months. There was no food in the larders or coal in the coal bin.

She did not care. She moved back anyway.

An army of servants arrived within an hour of her return, though not by her instructions. They brought her personal belongings, all neatly packed, and food and candles and coal, as well as pails and mops and brooms and other cleaning paraphernalia—as though she had none of her own. They did not look to her for instructions, but set about lighting fires in all the downstairs rooms and cleaning everywhere and getting the kitchen orderly and functional and doing a hundred and one other tasks. They were supervised everywhere by a ferociously energetic Mrs. Primrose, Imogen’s housekeeper and cook, who had been staying with her sister in the lower part of the village during the latter’s confinement, but had come almost at a run when a footman from the hall brought her the news that my lady was back in residence.

She soon had a cup of tea to set at Imogen’s elbow in the sitting room and some raisin scones fresh out of the oven, and professed herself to be in her seventh heaven at being back working where she belonged. Those last words were said with a note of reproach. Imogen had chosen to live alone when she first came here, much to the consternation of her father-in-law and the disappointment of Mrs. Primrose—it was a courtesy title since she had never been married—who had been promoted from senior chambermaid at the hall and still lived there in her room in the attic.

Blossom had been brought to the dower house in a housemaid’s basket. She had expressed no particular objection, having never quite recovered from having had her chair by the drawing room fire taken away and replaced with one she did not find nearly as comfortable, and one she was moreover expected to relinquish every time a certain man was in the room to claim it for himself. She prowled about the new environment, upstairs and down, before selecting a chair on one side of the fireplace in the sitting room. No one ordered her to get down. She was fed tasty victuals in the kitchen and assigned a comfortable bed for the nights in one corner beside the oven. She promptly forgot the old home and adopted the new.

The sound of hammers from the direction of the roof was close to being deafening all day, but Imogen did not mind. At least the noise gave indication that the job was being done. And living in a noisy, chilly, slightly damp, very dusty house—at least for the first hour or two—was certainly preferable to the alternative.

She did not set foot outside the house for the entire first day, even to check her garden to see if an early snowdrop had made its appearance yet. She had hardly left the sitting room since it had been cleaned and all was bustle and activity elsewhere. She even ate there, as Mrs. Primrose declared the dining room still unfit for her ladyship.

Imogen felt she was in heaven. She sat during the evening, as she had all afternoon, with her workbag beside her and a book open on her lap. Mostly, though, she enjoyed the silence and solitude. Her housekeeper and the roof workers were gone for the day, and all the extra servants had returned to the hall.

He read Alexander Pope, she thought as she turned a page of her own book. At least, that was the volume that had been on the table beside his chair in the library when she had looked one morning. Perhaps he had taken one glance inside it and closed it and neglected to return it to the shelf. Perhaps he had not even taken a glance.

And perhaps he had read it.

Why did she always want to believe the worst of him?

She set a hand flat on her book to hold it open, closed her eyes, and rested her head against the back of her chair. If only last night could be erased from memory. No, not just from memory—from fact. If only none of it had happened. If only she had returned home with Aunt Lavinia and Cousin Adelaide.

But if onlys were pointless. She had spent three years learning that lesson.

Could she not simply have enjoyed that waltz without . . . Well, she could not even complete the thought. She did not know what else she had felt but enjoyment. Enchantment, perhaps?

He had asked the question on the way home. Very few people ever had, even her own family, though she suspected many had wondered. Only her fellow Survivors and the physician at Penderris knew the truth—the full truth, and she had volunteered the information to them.

How had he dared to ask? He was a near stranger. I suppose you were raped. But she guessed he was the sort of man who dared ask anything, who believed it was his God-given right to pry into other people’s secrets.

She hated him with a passion.

She wondered if he had believed her answer.

She had hated him for asking. Yet she had kissed him immediately after. Oh, yes, she had. There was no denying it this time. He had kissed her for a few seconds, it was true. But after that she had kissed with as much passionate abandon as he had kissed her. Probably more, for she doubted his passion had been anything more than lust, while hers . . . She did not know what hers had been. And if it had been pure lust on his part, why had he put such an abrupt end to their embrace? Why had he not taken more liberties while he could? It must have been obvious that she was not resisting him, and there had been several minutes left of the journey and its enforced closeness and privacy.

She did not understand him or know him. She liked to believe she did both. She disliked him and wanted to despise him. And he made it easy for her to believe that he was empty of everything but arrogance and conceit—and charm.

She liked to believe she disliked him. Yet down on the beach she had said he was almost likable. Oh, this was all very confusing and very upsetting.

Hewas the one who had sent the army of servants after her to the dower house this morning. One of them had admitted it when she was still hoping it had been Aunt Lavinia. He might have done it, of course, out of sheer delight to be rid of her and determination to give her no possible excuse to return. But it would be spiteful to believe that.

She really did not know him at all. And sometimes, she thought, extraordinary beauty, even male beauty, must be a disadvantage to the person who possessed it, for it was easy to look only at the outer package and assume that there was nothing of any corresponding worth within.

When confronted, he had assured her that there was nothing inside him but charm. Despite herself, Imogen smiled at the memory. He had a gift for absurdity—a fact that suggested a certain wit, a certain intelligence, even a certain attractive willingness to laugh at himself. She did not want to believe it of him.

She went to bed early after an exhausting day of doing nothing and lay awake until sometime after four o’clock.

*   *   *

The first thing Percy did when he got out of bed the morning following the assembly was tear down the offending curtains at his window, rods and all. They had made his room so dark through the night that when he awoke at some unknown hour he had been unable to see so much as his hand before his face. If he had got out of his bed and taken a few steps away from it, it might have taken him an hour to find it again. Had Lady Barclay told him that one of her Survivor friends was blind? It did not bear thinking of. Neither did she. Last night . . . Well, that did not bear thinking of either.

A whole lot of things in the past week did not bear thinking of.

He instructed Crutchley to have the old curtains restored to his bedchamber, winds and gales be damned, and to see to it that there were no more uncomfortable surprises awaiting him when he went to bed at night. His heart might well not stand the strain. And he intended to stay in the earl’s chambers, he added, even if he found eels or frogs or both in his bed tonight.

He steeled himself for the ordeal of stepping into the dining room for breakfast. He was still not sure if he owed Lady Barclay an apology, though he was rather inclined to believe he did not. If she did not like being kissed, then she could jolly well keep herself out of his reach. Which was, as it quickly became apparent, exactly what she had decided to do. Lady Lavinia almost fell over her tongue in her eagerness to impart the dreadful tidings that dear Imogen was gone. But before Percy could conceive more than a flashing image of her fleeing up over the bleak moors in the general direction of the even bleaker Dartmoor, he was informed that she had returned to the dower house to stay even though all those men were still swarming all over the roof. Lady Lavinia made it sound as though each of them had a peephole up there and had nothing better to do with his time than peep through it.

Lady Barclay had taken nothing with her, of course, impractical woman as she was. Presumably she would prefer to freeze and starve and live forever in the same clothes and be deafened by hammer blows rather than spend another day beneath a roof with him.

Well, he preferred it too—that last part, anyway.

He left the dining room without further ado and gave orders to pack up her clothes and other personal belongings and send them after her, together with any and all supplies she would need, including her own housekeeper. He gave instructions that the servants who conveyed everything remain to make the house fully habitable even if it took all day, as it probably would. The roof, he believed, would not let any of the elements in, even if it was not quite finished. When he stepped into the drawing room for a moment, the cat that always kept his chair warm for him glared balefully at him and dared him to banish her, and he gave the order to send her over to the dower house to glare at Lady Barclay and perhaps give her some company. That would get rid of one stray.

She was not going to make a martyr of herself for the pleasure of sitting heavily on his conscience. It would be just like her—a conclusion that was without any solid evidence and doubtless unworthy of him.

He needed to get away from the hall and the park. He needed to blow away some cobwebs.

He spent much of the day in Porthmare, therefore, though not the part of it in which most of his new acquaintances had their homes, the genteel part in the river valley, sheltered from the sea and the rawest of the elements, their houses arrayed on the slopes to either side of the river with pleasant views over it and the picturesque pair of arched stone bridges that spanned it. He decided instead to see the fishing village below, its whitewashed cottages built about the broad estuary that connected river and sea and was fully exposed to the latter. The people down there, mostly fisherfolk, did not belong to him and did not work for him, except perhaps at some seasonal jobs when extra hands were needed. But they were a part of the neighborhood in which he had his principal seat, and while he was here he might as well acquaint himself with some of them if he could. He might even be able to think of some intelligent questions to ask.

He left his horse at the inn where the assembly had been held the night before and walked down to the lower village. There was much open space here, he found, the steep cliffs at some distance on either side of the wide estuary. Fishing boats bobbed on its sheltered channels. Gulls wheeled and cried overhead. It seemed a little warmer down here than it did up on Hardford land. The scenery was definitely more stark, though. The air was saltier. The tide was out.

He spent several idle hours simply wandering about and exchanging greetings with villagers who happened to be outdoors, working on an upturned boat or a net, or standing in groups gossiping while children darted about in exuberant pursuit of one another. He ended up in the taproom of an inn less grand in appearance than the one in the upper village, but reasonably clean and serviceable nonetheless. There were several men there, hunched over their ale, and Percy drew a few of them into conversation

He did not have a perfectly easy time of it, of course. It was impossible to blend into near invisibility among these villagers, who probably all knew one another anyway. They tended to be either awed speechless by the sight of him or clearly suspicious, even resentful, of his appearance thus among them in their own domain instead of remaining in his own, where he belonged. Well, he could not blame them, he supposed. He might resent it too if they took to wandering uninvited about his park and expected him not only to bob his head and pull on his forelock at the sight of them but also to exchange respectful greetings. And when a few men at the inn did respond to his conversational overtures, it seemed at first almost as if they were speaking a foreign language, so thick was their Cornish accent. He had to listen carefully just to get the gist of what they were saying.

He did not begin the conversation with any agenda in mind beyond getting better acquainted with this particular remote corner of England. But after a while he found himself tilting his apparently aimless chatter in a certain direction and gathering a few snippets of interesting information, even if doing so involved sifting through the barefaced lies he was told to get at the truth.

Smuggling in this area? This area? Puzzled looks and slowly shaking heads. Scratched heads. No, never. Not in a hundred years or more, anyway. Not like in the days of their long-ago forebears. The old-timers, now, would be able to tell him a tale or two, but even they could only tell the tales they had been told around a winter fire when they were nippers. Smuggling wouldn’t pay these days, even supposing anyone was interested in starting it up. Not with the revenue men breathing down their necks and the riding officers wasting their time out and about on the headlands looking for what was just not there. The government was wasting its money on their wages, it was. There was nothing for them to find hereabouts. Why should they use their boats for smuggling, anyway, when they could get a good catch of fish far more easily and make a lawful and decent living that way?

Gangs? Violence? Enforcement? In the olden days, maybe. The old-timers did tell some tall tales that would lift the hairs on the back of your neck, but no doubt they were just that—tall tales with no real truth to them. All they were good for was to make the nippers’ eyes grow big as saucers and get them calling out for their mams in the middle of the night. These days they were a law-abiding lot, they were.

There was definitely smuggling in the area, then, Percy concluded as he walked back to his horse and rode home. And it was clearly organized for maximum efficiency, with a leader and rules and a sure way of enforcing secrecy.

He did not particularly care if there was smuggling or not. It was a fact of life and was never going to end. There was no point in getting all excited and righteous about it unless one were a revenue man or a riding officer—or unless one’s own property was sometimes used as a transportation route or even for storage, as the cellar of the dower house had once been. And unless the servants in one’s employ were being terrorized and even harmed, presumably so that they would keep their mouths shut.

And,he wondered suddenly, arrested by the thought, unless the room one occupied at night were facing full-on to the sea so that on some dark and moonless night one might, if one happened to be awake, have a panoramic view of a fleet of small boats rowing into the bay below from a larger ship anchored some distance out and of a band of smugglers appearing through the break in the headland loaded to the gills with boxes and casks?

Was that the explanation for damp beds and walls and soot and thick, opaque curtains?

He tried to picture Crutchley with a cutlass between his teeth and a patch over one eye. He found himself smiling at the mental image his mind created. But he had thoroughly aroused his own curiosity.

He rode back home and tethered his horse in the paddock behind the stables rather than leading it straight inside to be tended. He instructed Mimms, his own groom, to make himself scarce for at least the next half hour, and went in search of the limping stable hand he had seen a few times.

He was a thin, ginger-haired man who must be in his middle twenties if he had been fourteen when Lady Barclay went off to war with her husband, though he could easily have passed for thirty or forty or more. His legs were noticeably crooked. His face was pale and curiously dead looking. He was mucking out a stall when Percy hailed him.

“Bains?”

“M’lord?” He stopped what he was doing and looked in the general direction of Percy, round-shouldered and shifty-eyed.

“Walk out to the paddock with me,” Percy said. “I am a bit concerned about the right foreleg of my mount.”

The man looked surprised. “Shall I fetch Mr. Mimms?” he asked.

“I have just sent Mimms on an important errand,” Percy said. “I want you to take a look. You were personal groom to the late Viscount Barclay once upon a time, were you not?”

Bains looked further surprised. But he set aside his fork, brushed straw from his coat and breeches, and stepped outside. Percy waited until he had gentled the horse with skilled hands and crooning voice and was bent over its foreleg. They were out of earshot from the stables.

“Who did it to you?” he asked.

He did not expect an answer, of course, and he got none. Well, almost none. Bains did straighten up sharply.

“Who did what, m’lord?”

“Keep working,” Percy said, leaning his arms along the fence. “In all fairness, I did not expect you to come out with a name. Will you answer a few questions with yes or no, though? Viscount Barclay was opposed to the smuggling that was going on in this area, was he not?”

Bains was carefully examining the horse’s leg.

“I was just a lad,” he said. “I was not his lordship’s personal groom.”

“He opposed smuggling?”

“I knew his opinions on horses,” the man said. “That was all.”

“Did you too voice an objection to smuggling after he had gone?” Percy asked. “Because you admired him so much?”

“I wanted to go with him,” Bains told him. “I wanted to be his batman, to look after his things and him. My dad wouldn’t let me go. He was afraid I would get hurt.”

“Ironic, that,” Percy said. “You liked Viscount Barclay?”

“Everyone liked him,” Bains said.

“And admired him?”

“He was a fine gentleman. He ought to have been—”

“—the earl after his father’s passing?” Percy said. “Yes, indeed he ought. But he died instead.”

“That Mawgan went with him instead,” Bains said. “Just because he was Mr. Ratchett’s niece’s boy and had pull and was eighteen years old. But he was no good. He ran away in the end. Said he was foraging for firewood up in them foreign hills when the frogs came and took his lordship and her ladyship. But I would bet anything he was hiding among the rocks scared as anything and then ran away. I would have saved them if I had been there. But I wasn’t. There is nothing wrong with this horse’s leg, m’lord.”

“I must have just imagined that he was favoring it on the way back up from the village, then,” Percy said. “It is always as well to check, though, is it not? Did you try to stop the smuggling here so that Lord Barclay would be proud of you?”

“There is some smuggling going on up the Bristol Channel way, or so they say,” Bains said, straightening up again. “And some over Devon way. But I never been farther from home than ten miles, if that, so I wouldn’t know for sure.”

“Or did you flatly refuse to join the gang?” Percy asked. “Or threaten to expose them to the revenue men? No, don’t answer. There is no need. Take one last look down at that leg. I will do so as well. One never knows who is watching, does one, even if we cannot be heard. Nothing? I am glad to hear it. Off with you, then. You might as well take the horse with you.”

Bains made his way back to the stables, leading the horse. It was obvious that every step was painful to him. Percy wondered if the old earl had hired a reputable physician to set his broken legs. Soames? He wondered too just how badly they had been broken.

He was going to have to stop all this, he thought as he made his way back to the house. He must be very bored indeed if he was starting to fancy himself as some sort of Bow Street Runner. He was going to be getting himself into trouble if he was not careful. And he really did not want to be thinking about smashed legs and dark coves on moonless nights and weighty kegs being carried up that cliff path and shady characters breaking into the cellar of the dower house beneath the very feet of the marble lady.

Or of himself dashing to her rescue, sword flashing in one hand, pistol brandished in the other.

Didhe owe her an apology? She had been a full participant in that kiss last night. But what gentleman asked a lady with barefaced cheek if she had been raped? The very thought that he had done just that was enough to make him break out in a cold sweat.

*   *   *

Imogen was kneeling in the grass the following morning, looking at what was definitely a snowdrop, though there was no blossom yet. Even the frail shoot, though, was a welcome harbinger of spring. And surely the air was marginally warmer today. The sun was shining.

The work on her roof was finished. Mr. Tidmouth had been paid, and he and his men had gone away. He had assured her that the roof was good for the next two hundred years at the very least. She hoped it would not leak the next time there was rain.

She ought to walk down into the village and call upon Mrs. Park to see if she had taken any harm from her outing to the assembly. She ought to call at the vicarage and let the girls twitter at her about the dance and their conquests there—their parents always discouraged frivolous talk, but girls sometimes needed someone to whom they could twitter to their hearts’ content. She ought to go up to the hall to assure Aunt Lavinia that the dower house was perfectly comfortable again. She ought to write an answering letter to Gwen, Lady Trentham, Hugo’s wife, who had written to inform her that young Melody, their new daughter, appeared to have recovered from her colicky, crotchety start to life before Christmas and was eagerly anticipating her journey to Penderris Hall with her mama and papa in March. She ought to . . .

Well, there were numerous things she ought to do. But she could settle to nothing even though she kept telling herself that it was sheer heaven to be back in her own home. Alone.

And lonely.

She must be feeling depressed. She never admitted to loneliness—simply because there was no loneliness to admit to.

And then she was alone no longer. A shadow fell across her from the direction of the garden gate, and she looked up, desperately hoping it was Aunt Lavinia or Tilly or even Mr. Wenzel or Mr. Alton. Anyone but . . .

“Saying your prayers in the brisk outdoors, Cousin Imogen?” the Earl of Hardford asked.

She got to her feet and shook out her skirts and her cloak.

“There is a snowdrop here,” she said, “though it has not bloomed yet. I always look for the first one.”

“You believe in springtime, then?” he asked.

“Believe in?” She looked inquiringly at him.

“New life, new beginnings, new hope,” he suggested, circling one gloved hand in the air. “Off with the old, on with the new, and all that rally-the-old-and-tired-spirits stuff?”

“I want only an end to the cold,” she said, “and the sight of flowers and leaves on the trees.”

If he asked her to walk with him today, she would say no. But even as she thought it, he opened the gate and stepped inside, Hector at his heels.

“It is a lovely day,” she said.

He looked up at the blue sky above and then back down at her.

“Must we talk about the weather?” he asked. “It lacks a certain . . . originality as a topic of conversation, would you not agree? But it is a lovely day, I must concede. I came to bring the joyful tidings that dearest Fluff has presented the world with kittens—six of them, all apparently as healthy as horses. No runts. And I have it on the most reliable authority that they are the sweetest things in the world.”

“Aunt Lavinia?”

“And a few assorted maids and one footman, who ought to have been on duty in the hall but had inexplicably taken a wrong turn and ended up in the stables instead,” he said. “Mrs. Ferby is as usual unimpressed with such sentimental stuff. I may even have heard a rumble of drown ’em spoken in her voice as I left the dining room after breakfast, but it may have been merely the rumble of a bit of dyspepsia coming from her, ah, stomach.”

She had no choice, Imogen thought. She could not be openly rude, even to him. Especially when he was spouting absurdities again.

“Would you care to step inside, Lord Hardford?” she asked him. “Would you care for a cup of tea, perhaps?”

“Both, thank you.” He smiled at her, his spontaneous, genuine smile—which somehow did not look either spontaneous or genuine.

If she did not know better, Imogen thought as she led the way inside, she would say he was ill at ease. She did not want him here. Did he not realize that? Did he not understand that she had come back here yesterday, even before the house was ready for her, in order to escape from him? Though that was perhaps a little unfair. She had come back to escape from herself, or, rather, from the effect she had allowed him to have on her. She did not want to feel the pull of his masculinity and the corresponding stirring of her femininity.

He and Blossom eyed each other in the sitting room. Blossom won the confrontation. He took the chair on the other side of the fireplace after Imogen had seated herself firmly in the middle of a love seat. Hector plopped down at his feet, ignored by the cat. Mrs. Primrose had seen them come in and would bring the tea tray without waiting for instructions. Visitors were always plied with her tea and whatever sweet delight she had baked that day.

He talked with great enthusiasm about the weather until the tray had arrived and Imogen had poured their tea and set his beside him with two oatmeal biscuits propped in the saucer. He made dire predictions for the future based upon the fact that they had been enjoying a string of fine days and must surely suffer as a consequence. He almost had her laughing with his monologue, and once again she was forced to admit to herself that she almost liked him. She might even withdraw the qualification of the almost if he did not fill her sitting room to such an extent that there seemed to be almost no air left to breathe.

She resented that charisma he seemed to carry about with him wherever he went. It seemed undeserved.

He picked up one of his biscuits and bit into it. He chewed and swallowed.

“If not that, then what?” he asked abruptly, and curiously she knew exactly what he was talking about. His whole manner had changed, and so had the atmosphere in the room. If not rape, he was asking her, then what?

She ought to refuse to answer. He had no right. No one else had ever asked her outright. At Penderris, everyone—even the physician, even George—had waited until she was ready to volunteer the information. It had taken two years for it all to come out. Two years. She had known him . . . how many days? Eight? Nine?

“Nothing,” she said. “You were mistaken in your assumption.”

“Oh,” he said, “I believe you. But something happened.”

“My husband died,” she said.

“But you not only mourn,” he said, looking at the biscuit in his hand as though he had only just realized it was there, and taking another bite. “You also refuse to continue to live.”

He was too perceptive.

“I breathe air into my lungs,” she told him, “and breathe it out again.”

“That,” he said, “is not living.”

“What do you call it, then?” she asked, annoyed. Could he not take a hint and talk about the weather again?

“Surviving,” he said. “Barely. Living is not merely a matter of staying alive, is it? It is what you do with your life and the fact of your survival that counts.”

“Spoken by an authority?” she asked him.

But she thought unwillingly of her fellow Survivors who had done a great deal with their lives and their survival in the years since Penderris. Ben, though he still struggled to walk, had acquired a great deal of mobility since taking to a wheeled chair and was the very busy manager of prosperous coal mines and ironworks in Wales. He was also happily married. Vincent, despite his blindness, walked and rode and exercised, even boxed, and composed children’s stories with his wife, stories that she then illustrated before they were published. They had a son. Flavian, Hugo, Ralph—they were all married too and living active, presumably happy lives. Yet she could remember them all when they were so broken that even drawing in another lungful of air had been a burden. Ralph in particular had been suicidal for a long time.

But none of them carried her particular burden. Just as she carried none of theirs. What if she could not see the first snowdrop, not this year or ever? What if she could never stride along the cliff path or the beach below?

He had not answered her question. He was chewing the last mouthful of his first biscuit.

“What happened?” he asked.

“Oh, confession is a two-way business, Lord Hardford,” she said sharply. “Unless one is a priest, perhaps. You also have stories you would rather not tell.”

The progress of his second biscuit was arrested two inches from his mouth. “But one would not wish to scandalize a lady,” he said, lowering it, “or scorch her ears with unsavory stories.”

She tutted. “You are terrified of the sea,” she said, “and of the cliffs. I daresay it was only your pride because I, a mere woman, was there that got you down the path onto the beach a few days ago.”

He set the biscuit back in his saucer.

“Are we bartering here, Cousin Imogen?” he asked. “Your story for mine?”

Oh.

Oh. No.

She ought to have thought before she spoke. She ought not to have started any of this.

“Shall I go first?” he asked.