‘No, I suspect it’s a mean little affair, much like the rest my one-time guardian had running in his lifetime. His nephew seems even less effectual, if also slightly less mad, than he turned out to be.’
‘Yes, he does seem to have been a bully of the worst sort, but a coward with it, I suspect,’ Peters said as if that was all the world needed to remember of Philip Grably, and Tom wondered if he was right.
‘He was a twisted and devious coward and bully, though. All the tales I hear of my father when I ride about the estate and villages have made me realise he knew this place like the back of his hand. I can’t help remembering how Grably used to rave he loved my mother better than any other man and how dared my father lay his filthy hands on such a perfect and fragile woman when he wasn’t fit to black her boots? I suspect he might have murdered my father, for all the good that could do him when my mother was already dead. Perhaps he thought he was avenging her, or who knows what he thought when he pitched his supposed best friend down a two-hundred-foot drop onto the rocks below five years after she died?’
‘That’s a grim suspicion to live with, Mantaigne,’ Peters said with sympathy Tom would have felt uncomfortable with only weeks ago.
‘Aye, but it could explain how my father stumbled so close to the edge of a cliff-path he walked every morning and knew better than anyone.’
‘It could, but if so it’s a secret Grably took to his grave,’ Peters agreed quietly.
‘True,’ Tom replied with a frown at a certain window in the old part of the castle where the women had their quarters. ‘And the Trethaynes are alive and under my roof. Their welfare trumps old sins.’
‘Indeed,’ Peters agreed so blandly that Tom decided he didn’t care if the man thought he was a besotted fool or not.
‘Don’t you think it strange even a junior branch of such an old and powerful family was left to beg, borrow or steal their daily bread?’
‘Profligacy has brought many a rich man to ruin,’ Peters said with such austerity Tom wondered if that was a reason a clever and devious man might become a lawyer and whatever else the man was when he wasn’t busy.
‘I know, but Lord Trethayne’s fortune seems intact. I don’t know how the man could leave those children to starve when he should feel a moral duty to look after his nephew’s family, even if the idiot didn’t leave them to his care until they were grown. That seems the logical step for the nephew of a lord to take when he began to breed so many boys with his second wife, don’t you think?’
‘The late Mr Trethayne doesn’t sound like a sensible man.’
‘No, but his second wife fled to this country after the revolution in France. She must have known first-hand how it felt to lose everything and would have pushed the idiot to make some provisions for her children, however feckless he was otherwise,’ Tom confided the unease he’d felt about that destitution ever since he found the family here scraping a living on his land.
‘I believe his ruin began after the lady died, but it happened nearly a decade ago and I can’t recall any details. Nobody mentioned he had children when the tale of his rash dealings and sad end went the rounds, so I didn’t think it remarkable Lord Trethayne disclaimed all responsibility at the time. Now I can see that you’re right; it’s odd and needs looking into, if only to find out why he didn’t help them. I expect I will find out more in London at this time of year than I could at Trethayne’s country seat, so I’d best arrange to be summoned there urgently before the week is out if you truly wish me to take this any further.’
‘Aye, I do, and I’m sure the place is teeming with crimes and misdemeanours awaiting your attention by now,’ Tom said with a mocking grin to offset Peters’s knowing smile that he cared enough about the Trethaynes to go to so much trouble on their behalf.
‘At least I’ll be spared the tension in any room when you and Miss Trethayne are in it for the next few days. I half expect crockery or candlesticks to start flying round the room whenever you meet without one of Miss Trethayne’s brothers or Lady Wakebourne there to make you guard your tongues and tempers,’ Peters replied with a look that told Tom he also wondered if he was about to be punched in the nose.
‘Well, don’t, Miss Trethayne is too much of a lady to vent her temper on innocent bystanders. If I can remind Lord Trethayne of his duty to his family and the fact she and her brothers are his responsibility, at least they might be able to go home and excuse the rest of you such a state of civil war at the breakfast table.’
‘She will never agree to go anywhere near the old vulture after he left her to tramp the roads with three little boys when her father died,’ Peters cautioned as if warning him not to get his hopes up.
‘The trick will be to present things to her in the right terms,’ Tom said with a feeling finding those words wasn’t going to be as easy as he made out, especially as his best words seemed to desert him in Miss Trethayne’s company and all sorts of wrong-headed ideas took their place.
‘I doubt a poet could come up with those,’ Peters cautioned.
‘I can’t let her leave Dayspring with nothing in her pockets and an easy mark for any rogue who might threaten or exploit her and her band of fellow vagrants.’
‘If I were you, Mantaigne, I’d look a little deeper into that particular charitable impulse before you lose something precious without ever realising you had it.’
Tom felt his way along that sentence and found knots in it. There was a deep sadness in Peters’s expression he’d never thought he’d be allowed to see, and Tom fumbled to pretend he hadn’t seen that glimpse of the man’s private self Peters wouldn’t relish sharing with the likes of him.
‘Just as well you’re not me then,’ he said facetiously and saw Peters’s frown at his refusal to be counselled.
He might have learned to love his childhood home again, had even let the sad old house and grounds and the folk on the estate into his life as far as he could, but he wasn’t ready to give up everything he’d learnt about surviving in a hostile world. If he let himself care about everyone within his orbit he’d collapse. Too many people depended on him for him to risk burdening himself with a wife and a ready-made family and hadn’t he decided on his way here he had true friends in Luke and his family? So he should be able to look forward to the end of Virginia’s three months with the lightest of hearts.
Yet, despite her poverty and unconventional life, Polly Trethayne wasn’t a female he could stow in a neat little corner of his life labelled ‘mistress’ and forget the rest of the time. She wouldn’t fit, for one thing; for another he didn’t want to leave her less than she was now and embittered by his betrayal into the bargain. He wanted her with a passion he couldn’t recall being this fierce even as a spotty youth desperate to find out about sex and any female who’d let him have some with her. What he felt was a freakishly heated physical attraction that would burn out as soon as he got her out of his castle and as far away as he could put her. Even a few miles away would be good enough for now, though.
He felt the gap in his heart and mind at the idea of being a stranger to her and hers again. He licked his suddenly dry lips and tasted her on them, as if her lush mouth had only just parted from his instead of the gap of impossible that stretched between them. He was the one who walked away; he’d made that gap and would always have to make it.
Haunted by the idea he might look back on this time with the bitter regret Peters seemed to feel about some lost chance at love he regretted, he made himself remember where and what he was. With Peters probably noting the reminiscent smile Tom found himself giving at the thought of creeping through a dark and dusty mausoleum with Polly Trethayne’s hand in his, it was high time he remembered the Marquis of Mantaigne cared for nobody again, especially not for a female he’d never be able to ignore as so many of his peers did their wives once they’d got their obligatory heir and spare.