Jess grinned to himself. He had trespassers; village children, probably, who were using the paddock because no one else did. There used to be an elderly donkey grazing there, he remembered, who had most likely brayed and galloped off into the Shades long ago to eat grass in heaven instead of in Jesmond Park. There was a small stand of trees to pass through before he finally reached the spot where the trespassers were enjoying themselves.
For all the happy noise they were making, there were only three of them. A boy and a girl who looked to be about ten years old and, by their casual dress, were a tenant farmer’s children, and a russet-haired youth, similarly attired, who was bowling at the girl. They were playing single-wicket with a crude cricket bat. They were so intent on their game that they did not see him, until the girl, skying a ball, was caught by the boy.
Jess clapped his hands together and exclaimed, ‘Well bowled! May I have a go now?’
All three of them turned to look at him. The youth said in a clear, pleasant voice, ‘You must be the new owner of Jesmond House. We really ought to apologise for playing here—but it’s the only convenient piece of turf near to home. I suppose you’ll want us to leave.’
He was a handsome enough lad with a cheeky face, who held himself well for all his rough dress. The boy said reproachfully, ‘Oh, come on, Georgie, he said that he wanted a go. Give him your bat, Annie—unless you wish to bowl, sir.’
Another educated rustic. Jess said, stretching out a hand, ‘I was never much use as a bowler, but with the bat—that was different.’
Annie handed him the bat, saying confidentially, ‘Don’t judge Georgie’s bowling by what I was receiving—that’s all,’ she added, for Gus was putting his hand over his mouth to indicate that she was not to say too much.
So Georgie was a bit of a demon bowler, was he? And here he stood, scarcely dressed for a real game in his tight trousers and his fashionable cravat, which held his head stiff and high as it was intended to. On the other hand, Georgie was slight—although sometimes slight men were the most cunning and successful bowlers of all.
On yet another impulse—he was having a lot of them these days—Jess ripped off his cravat, tossed it aside and undid the top button of his shirt before taking guard.
The lad’s run up was short and the trundling ball was artfully pitched, spinning away from him; nevertheless, he hit it hard and high, but not too much so, because of the youth of the players. Gus gave a squeal of excitement, Annie put an awed finger in her mouth to watch the ball’s flight while Georgie ran towards where it was falling—only to miss it by inches when it hit the ground and ran into the scrub which bordered the paddock. The lad ran after it, his coat flying open to reveal his loose shirt which had fallen out of his breeches.
It also revealed something else which brought up Jess a little short, although he had half-suspected it. Georgie was plainly no lad, but a girl dressed in her brother’s clothes, and when she scrambled enthusiastically into the bushes to kneel down to rescue the ball from where it was hiding, it was quite plain that Miss Georgie was a veritable tomboy—a romp, no less.
A judgement which was borne out when she threw the ball, overarm, straight and accurately at Gus, shouting, ‘Catch, Gus—and now it’s your turn to bowl.’
Gus caught it, moaning reproachfully, ‘Oh, I say, Georgie, he’s a regular Corinthian, I shan’t stand a chance against him.’
Jess raised his bat in salute—amused that Gus should describe him with a word used of fashionable idlers who never did a hand’s turn. His camouflage—something which he had sometimes adopted in London when on one of Ben Wolfe’s missions—was obviously working well.
He was rewarded with a belligerent glare and a slow trundler from Gus which he treated with more respect than it deserved as he did the second and third he received. But he let fly at Gus’s fourth, only to be caught by the rampant lass, Georgie—or more accurately, perhaps, Georgina.
She smiled triumphantly at him before Gus exclaimed, ‘Oh, that was a gift, that was. He meant you to catch it, Georgie. He really knows how to play.’
Georgie’s triumph disappeared immediately. She said reproachfully to Jess as she held the ball high, ‘Was it, sir? Did you intend to be caught out?’
Before he could answer, she continued, her tone quite changed. ‘Oh, it’s very wrong of me to question you so rudely. You are most plainly the owner of this land, Miss Jesmond’s heir, for who else would be strolling in her grounds dressed like a refugee from Piccadilly? And we are equally plainly trespassers. You have every right to offer me a dolly drop and, now I think of it, you were almost certainly being kind to Gus to let him take your wicket. Allow me to apologise to you at once.’
Jess, who had handed his bat to Annie, smiled at Miss Georgie’s impulsive speech.
‘Not at all,’ he said, and walked towards her so that they stood face to face before he bowed elaborately to complete his portrayal of a Piccadilly lounger.
‘Allow me to apologise for doing it too brown. I should have known that Master Gus was fly enough to grasp when he was being patronised. I wonder if you would agree to let Gus and Annie play at single-wicket alone for a few moments while I have a quiet word with you.’
Georgie looked at him closely for the first time. At a distance he had been an impressive figure of a man, tall and broad-shouldered, quite unlike her late husband who had been a stooped scholar. Near to he was, as she was later to tell an interested Caro, quite impossibly handsome—no man in the neighbourhood of Netherton could hold a candle to him. Golden-haired, blue-eyed, straight-nosed, with a long amused mouth, and—she noted a trifle dazedly—with trim ears, set close to his head, he was, indeed, the very model of a Prince in a fairy tale.
His voice was pleasant, too. It was also, she thought, the voice of a man who was accustomed to be obeyed. She wondered what he had to say to her privately as she told Gus and Annie to continue their game without them for a few moments.
Jess regarded her levelly. Close to, no one could mistake her for a boy, even though she had buttoned her coat so that her clinging shirt no longer revealed the lines of the small breasts which had given her sex away to him. He considered carefully what he was about to say: principally, that it was dangerous for her to parade around the countryside dressed like a lad. Her father should have more sense than to allow it. Particularly someone as young as she appeared to be.
He was not yet to know that he had quite mistaken Georgina’s age, which he had guessed, wrongly, to be under twenty. Later, he was to think that it was her lack of artifice, her frank manner, and the lack also of any kind of fashionable face-paint which had combined to deceive him.
‘I am, as you have guessed, the new owner of Jesmond House. My name is Jesmond Fitzroy. Miss Jesmond was my great-aunt and this is my first inspection of my property. Now, whilst I am not angry that you and your brother and sister have trespassed on my land, I am a trifle worried that your mother and father should allow so young a woman to go abroad dressed like a boy.
‘It is, I would submit, highly dangerous for you to put yourself at the mercy of any rogue who wanders the countryside, of whom there are many these days, and I consider it to be one of my first duties, seeing that I am the owner of Jesmond House, to so inform them—if you will be so good as to tell me your name.’
The play of feeling on Georgie’s mobile face was revealing. She was smiling at him when he began to speak, but by the end of his well-meant—but unfortunate—words of advice her face turned black as thunder. She thinned her lips and said nothing, but she was thinking a lot.
Jess waited for her to reply but, seeing that she apparently had no such intention, he continued, a little less agreeably,