‘Go get the boys,’ Polly ordered Lunar and Zounds, and they bounded off, or at least Lunar bounded. Zounds skittered after him as fast as his uneven gait would allow, and Ariel weighed his options and decided he would like a run, so he streaked after them like the wind. Cherry saw she was being left behind, gave Lord Mantaigne an apologetic lick and dashed off as well.
‘The pump?’ his lordship asked Polly with one of those exceptionally irritating eyebrows of his quirked in an imperious question.
‘There is no pump, only a bucket on a rope,’ she said to him with a nod at the most deeply shadowed corner of the yard.
This was no time to soften towards him and join in the mighty clean it would take before the empty stable block was at all usable. Polly fetched the giant key to the tack room on the other side of the quadrangle, daring him to complain at the decay he’d caused in the first place. They’d fought his wilful neglect since the first day they happened on the castle, so he could see for himself how hard that struggle was for an hour of his soft life.
He didn’t look soft as he turned the key in the ancient lock without apparent effort. It was beyond her strength to move it without both hands and much cursing and swearing, and Polly told herself it was wrong to ogle his magnificently displayed physique as blatantly as he had done hers and sighed under her breath. His coming here would change everything, and all the wishing him away in the world wouldn’t alter the fact he was home at last. An untamed part of her was intrigued and even a little bit triumphant about the fact he’d been well worth waiting for.
Well, he didn’t know about the Polly she kept well hidden, and she certainly wasn’t going to tell him. Nor was he going to lord it over them; not after neglecting this wonderful old place so shamefully a battalion of thieves could have hidden here without any risk of being challenged. She recalled her father telling her nobody could make her feel small and insignificant unless she let them and bit back a smile as she wondered what her adventurous parent would make of his tall and all-too-significant daughter now.
Not a great deal, a sneaky voice whispered in her ear, but she hid her self-doubts behind the mask of confidence Papa had taught her to use to outface her enemies. Except she couldn’t afford to be headlong and reckless and arrogant as he’d been the first to admit a true Trethayne was by nature and intent. He had lost every penny they ever had, and a good few they didn’t; then he died during an insane midnight race across the moors to try to recoup his losses with a mad bet on his favourite horse.
Claire, her stepmother, had died when her smallest brother was born, so seven years on from Stephen Trethayne’s reckless and untimely death Polly and her little brothers lived on whatever they could grow or make at Dayspring Castle, which went to show what happened when Trethaynes refused to rein in their wilder impulses. At times she had longed for a life of passion and adventure instead of hard work and loneliness, but Polly only had to recall how it felt to be seventeen with three little boys to raise on nothing and the urgency faded.
Yet a dart of something deep and dangerous had shot through her at first sight of this handsome golden-haired Adonis, staring back at her as if she was water in a desert. It still sang somewhere deep down inside her as if he’d branded her with warm lightning. She shivered at what might be, if she wasn’t four and twenty and father, mother and every other relative they had never had to three little brothers, and if Lord Mantaigne wasn’t one of the richest and most powerful aristocrats in the land.
She shook her head at the ridiculous idea of him wanting her as other than a passing fancy she was not willing to be. Trying to distract herself, she wondered how many horses and servants were on their way with the luxuries he would demand as his right. She could imagine him a great lord or prince in medieval times on a grand progress about the land with a huge entourage of brightly arrayed courtiers and an army of servants to answer his every need along the way. If Dayspring Castle was once capable of housing such a household, it certainly wasn’t now. She scaled down his retinue to a couple of carriages and a few carts laden with boxes of superbly cut clothes to deck him out in style.
He would need a valet to keep such splendour bandbox fresh and wasn’t it lucky the thought of him mincing down Bond Street carrying such an item after a visit to the milliner made her want to laugh? Whatever she thought of him, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to know what that was; even she couldn’t accuse him of being effete.
She would like to, of course, but she couldn’t delude herself so badly. Not with his powerful breadth of shoulder and heavily muscled arms on show when he stood there in his shirtsleeves ready to begin his Herculean task. He had narrow flanks and long and sleekly muscled legs, finishing in those damned boots of his that made him look more like a tidied-up pirate than the mincing marquis her imagination had painted him.
His hair might have started out the day in neatly ranked waves or even the artful disorder some of the dandies affected, but now his golden locks were in such disarray he must be as impatient of a hat on such a fine spring day as she was herself. Which didn’t mean they had anything in common. The fine cut of his immaculate waistcoat; the stark whiteness of his linen shirt and beautifully tied neckcloth all argued the Marquis of Mantaigne was used to the finest money could buy. Miss Paulina Trethayne had long ago resigned herself to life shorn of all her kind took for granted and sniffed, as if doubtful he could lift a pitchfork, let alone wield one.
‘You’ll get very dirty,’ she warned, as if he couldn’t see the dust and smell the unused staleness of the air inside long-neglected stables for himself.
‘I’ll wash,’ he said indifferently, letting her implied insult pass as he surveyed the dust of ages in front of him. ‘We’ll need those buckets and something to scrub with as well as more hay and straw, if it can all be got at short notice.’
‘Enough of both are in the barn and there’s more in the rickyard,’ she said, and he raised his annoying eyebrows again, as if surprised they were so organised. He might not be so pleased when he realised animals and crops came ahead of people in their household and there would not be enough to feed him in style.
‘Good, we’d best get on with it then, if you’ll tell us where a couple of decent brooms and buckets are, then leave us to our labours, Miss Trethayne?’ he said, as if he swept and washed down stables every day dressed in Bond Street’s finest and with that fallen-angel smile never wavering for a second.
Mr Peters eyed the blanket of stale dust and detritus overlaying everything and looked as if he had better places to be. Moved by his mournful look at his neatly made coat as he took it off, as if he was bidding goodbye to his sober raiment and tidy appearance for ever, Polly went to make sure fires were lit under the vast coppers in the laundry to provide baths for the lord as well as his man. If there was only water for one, doubtless the marquis would take it all and let his fastidious aide sleep in his dirt, so there was no point trying to make him even more eager to leave by skimping on such necessities after their hard labour.
* * *
Tom and Peters were almost unrecognisable as the lord of this ancient pile and his supposed secretary by the time all four cartloads of luggage and provisions rolled down the rutted drive. It was dusk and on the edge of true darkness by then and the grooms and stable lads seemed delighted to be at journey’s end, even if it didn’t promise more than a roof over their heads against the coming night. Their calls to each other and exclamations at the state of the roads and their new lodgings made the yard livelier than it must have been for decades. Tom shook his head as if he was Lunar trying to dislodge a persistent fly and dust and old cobwebs threatened their handiwork with a new sprinkling of ancient history.
‘Hercules had the River Styx handy to divert through the Augean Stables,’ Peters remarked gloomily as he swept up the dislodged dust and followed his broom outside into the fading daylight, before Tom could make more work.
‘And the nice warm Aegean to bathe in when he was done,’ Tom said with a grin at his once-pristine companion. ‘You look as if you’ve been pulled through a hedge backwards, rolled in the dust and trampled by a herd of wild horses.’
‘I feel filthy,’ Peters said disgustedly, and Tom laughed.