‘Good,’ Tom drawled, squaring his shoulders at the suspicion the man might be right.
* * *
‘Is Lord Mantaigne’s bedchamber ready yet?’ Lady Wakebourne asked Polly from the doorway of the great parlour.
‘It would take an army to make that echoing barrack room ready for him,’ Polly snapped back and felt the new tension in the air now the rightful owner was back in his castle. ‘They can both sleep in the South Tower with the rest of the men,’ she added, knowing all the same that nothing here was ever going to be the same again. ‘We can’t get them into the staterooms fast enough for my taste, but lodging the man in a musty and bat-ridden chamber in the empty part of the house won’t endear us to him in any way.’
‘And we don’t want him to feel more uncomfortable than he has to here.’
‘No, indeed,’ Polly agreed with a weary sigh.
‘Nor should we allow him the chance to form any wrong ideas about a lady residing under his roof, my dear. You must resume your petticoats in the daytime as well as at nights now, Paulina, whether you like them or not.’
‘I don’t. They’re confoundedly restricting and make it well-nigh impossible to for me to do any work,’ Polly complained, knowing her ladyship was right.
Casting a last glance round the comfortable room at the odd family they had made out of a pack of rootless strangers used of an evening, she wondered how many would stay in their own quarters tonight to avoid the puzzle of how the sweepings of the King’s Highway dined with a marquis. Biting back a wistful sigh for yesterday, when they had no idea the impossible was about to happen, she nodded her agreement and bit her lip against a furious protest against the darker whims of fate.
‘Never mind, my dear, it won’t be for long. The boy must loathe the place, given the terrible things the locals whisper about what he endured here as a boy, and this is the first time he’s been near Dayspring in twenty years. He probably won’t be back for another twenty, once he’s done whatever it is he came here to do.’
‘And whatever that might be, he certainly didn’t expect to find us here,’ Polly answered glumly. ‘I can’t imagine why you wrote to his godmother about whatever is going on here. You must have done that months ago, since the old lady has been dead three months,’ she said sharply, as all those nights when she had lain awake worrying about whoever was making incursions into the castle at night reminded her Lady Wakebourne was a devious woman.
‘He is the only person who can tell them to go, my dear. I wasn’t going to risk you losing your temper one day and confronting them, then maybe leaving those boys of yours even more alone in the world than they are already.’
‘Oh, then I suppose I can see your point,’ Polly conceded reluctantly, knowing she had a tendency to act first and think later, although of course a measured risk was perfectly acceptable and she had weighed that one up already and decided she needed more information before taking it.
‘And I am very fond of you, my dear. I want you to be safe and happy as much as any of us.’
‘Thank you, I am very fond of you to,’ Polly admitted.
‘Then there is no harm done between us?’ The lady actually sounded anxious about that and Polly had to nod and admit it.
‘No, but I now know you are a splendid actress and will be very wary of you in future.’
‘I don’t think I’ll take to the stage to repair my fortunes even so. Now run along upstairs and put some petticoats on, my dear, if only for my sake.’
‘Very well, but I still hate them.’
Going back across the courtyard to the women’s quarters, she climbed the stairs to her lofty room and washed hastily. Trying not to give herself time to think too much, she bundled herself into the patched and fraying quilted petticoat, wide overskirt and unfashionably long bodice she wore when she absolutely had to. It felt ancient and impractical, and she hated the corsets she had to wear to make the bodice fit and the curb the heavy skirt put on her long stride so she must mince along or hold them so high they were indecent and defeated the purpose of wearing them in the first place. Without the hoops and panniers the gown was designed for, it hung limply about her long legs, but it was the only gown she’d found that wasn’t so short on her it was more revealing than her breeches, so what couldn’t be cured must be endured.
Until she had come here and discovered the liberty of breeches and boots she must have spent her waking life enduring the wretched things, she supposed with a sigh. As she lifted her skirts to descend the stairs without tumbling down them, she wondered how she’d borne it for so long. She minced impatiently into the housekeeper’s kitchen they used instead of the vast castle kitchens and tried hard not to knock anything over now she felt several feet wider than usual.
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, girl, you’d look a fright even without the sad state of your hair,’ Lady Wakebourne exclaimed as she turned from stirring a saucepan for Prue with a look of despair at Polly’s unfashionable array.
‘What’s wrong with me now?’ Polly replied defensively.
‘It looks as if you last ran a comb through it about six months ago.’
Polly raised a hand to feel if she was right and realised the hasty plait she’d twisted it into first thing this morning had gone sadly awry and she might as well be wearing a bird’s nest on her head. She felt herself blush at the spectacle she must have made when Lord Mantaigne first laid eyes on her. She wasn’t surprised he’d let his gaze linger on her long legs and what curves she had to her name so impudently now. No, she was, she had to be. His preoccupation with her long limbs proved to her that any reasonably formed female body would do for him to bed a woman, she reminded herself militantly.
‘I’m not primping and preening for any man, let alone him,’ she said, even as the idea of sharing a meal with that finicky, arrogant aristocrat looking as if she had been left out in a tempest for a day made something deep inside her cringe.
‘Don’t worry, I think we would know that, even if you did the rest of us the courtesy of taking a brush and comb to that wild mess now and again.’
‘I’m not going all the way back to my room to try and turn myself into a sweet and docile lady for the marquis’s benefit.’
‘Not much risk of you ever being one of those, Miss Polly.’ The girl stooping over the fire to turn the spit for her sister Prue straightened up as far as she could to eye Polly critically. ‘If you wouldn’t mind watching this for me, your ladyship, I could take Miss Polly along to my room and tame that tangle into something closer to how it ought to look.’
‘Of course, Jane dear. Far be it from me to stand in the way of such a noble undertaking,’ Lady Wakebourne said cheerfully and took over the task with an ease her former friends might find a little distasteful if they could see her. Since they had turned their backs when she found out her husband had gambled away his fortune, Lady Wakebourne’s dowry and a whole lot more before he shot himself, Polly was very glad to have missed out on knowing them.
* * *
‘You have such beautiful hair, Miss Polly,’ Jane said when she finally persuaded Polly to sit still on a three-legged stool in her bedchamber on the other side of their makeshift kitchen from the men’s sleeping quarters, where the heat of the fires at least warded off the chill from the southwest winds and ancient walls left too long without enough fires powerful enough to warm them.
‘It gets in a mess as soon as I’ve finish tying it back every morning.’
‘That’s because it needs thinning here and there and if you’ll let me take a few inches off the ends, I’m sure you won’t find it so hard to manage,’ Jane said shyly as she undid the heavy mass,