‘Explain that to anyone who ever lays eyes on her and has seen one of us Hailes first, then. You can call her by another man’s name as much as you like, but you can’t pretend Drace had any hand in her with those features and dark brown eyes and all that jet-black hair to give you the lie.’
‘I won’t have to if you stay away from us. If you truly love her, you will go away and leave us to live a good enough life in another country without you. I can afford to give her the best of everything and make sure she has a good education and all the things you can never afford, circumstanced as you are. You have nothing to offer her and I can give her everything. Now my maid is getting frantic and signalling we must get aboard, before she and my worldly goods are forced to cross the Channel without us, so get out of the way, Magnus, and leave us be.’
‘And that is all you have to say to me?’
‘Yes. You must live a good life and forget all about us.’
‘How can I?’
‘Take lessons from the man who knows how it’s done,’ she said with a thin, bitter little smile and waved a dismissive hand in his direction before she turned away with his child to be scurried up the companionway by the impatient Captain of the packet boat. Then she took herself to the other side to look towards Calais and away from him. At last the boat embarked with Magnus gazing after it like a fool, watching every step and sail they took away from him as if he had a wicked spell laid on him and there was nothing he could do to tell the world his heart had been ripped out.
‘Guv,’ a skinny young man said to the brooding figure Hetta was suddenly so reluctant to disturb. Magnus Haile stood stock-still now and looked as if everything he ever cared about had left him for ever and his life was meaningless and empty without them. She must have caught at his name, like carelessly thrown jewels, when Lady Drace dropped it into her bitter farewell. This man Lady Drace had refused so coldly looked as if he’d been broken by his lover’s final rebuff. Hetta almost cried for him and she was no watering pot and was nearly sure she didn’t like him. ‘We need to get home, Mr Magnus,’ the youth urged, clearly uneasy in the face of such raw emotion which seemed to come off his master in waves as he stood there trying so hard to be impassive and rocklike and failing at it rather badly. At a distance he might look so, but this close to he was clearly spent. He ignored his unlikely-looking rescuer as if his ears had shut down after Lady Drace’s last bitter words stung him to the heart.
‘Mr Haile, your man is trying to get your attention.’ Hetta spoke up at last, and thank goodness she was too much of a stranger to need to search for words of comfort when the man looked back at her as if he knew there was none to be had.
‘Eh?’ he managed to say, as if reluctantly realising he had a new world to live in now the two people he most wanted in it had left him. ‘Oh, yes. There you are, Jem. Horses calmed and dealt with, are they?’
‘Aye, stabled and fed and asleep already when I left—which you looks as if you ought to be as well, if you don’t mind me saying so, Mr Magnus.’
‘Wouldn’t that be a handy trick?’ Mr Haile said softly, as if he hadn’t slept properly for longer than he cared to remember.
‘Whatever it is, you needs to come away now. Mr Wulf will skin me alive if I get you home in an even worse state than you was in last Easter when—’
The young man stopped himself and eyed Hetta as if he had suddenly realised she was a total stranger and couldn’t be trusted to keep a still tongue in her head about his master’s family and their obviously very tangled affairs.
‘I am no gossip,’ she reassured him earnestly and turned to meet Mr Haile’s dark eyes. Shock and a terrible weariness looked back at her. There was a faint glimmer of the man he ought to be looking at her with a tepid sort of interest, as if she was a being who knew far too much about him and he ought to care, but could not quite make the effort to do so. He seemed to have shut down all the power and vitality that made him so memorable at first sight, even if her motherly instincts had been on the alert for her son’s welfare at his furious hands at the time. This man now looked as if he was too tired and battle-weary to care what anyone did to him. Toby could dance on the topsail of the next ship to come in and drop on his head to break his fall and he would shake him off after a few stunned moments and go on with hardly even a blink to admit he had a headache.
‘I think you had best find this gentleman a good meal and a clean bed for the night, young man,’ she advised his unlikely companion gently, as if she knew he was being left to deal with a casualty and might need a little advice from a woman who was all too used to wrenching comfort out of spartan lodgings and a sometimes less than perfect life of her own.
‘You’re in the right of it there, missus. Rode here as if the devil was on his tail, he did. Ought to know better, but I can take care of him now,’ the youth said as if he was decades older than the man Lady Drace had just whistled down the wind as if lovers like him were ten a penny. Magnus Haile seemed almost broken and the last thing in the world to make him feel any better would be the pity of a strange woman. A part of her that should be ashamed of itself mourned for him as her fantasy lover. She could only imagine having a man like him in her own bed in her wildest dreams. Lady Drace was obviously made of finer stuff, though, and, since he was used to a lover of such graceful beauty and elegance, he would have no eye for a plain Mrs Champion even if he wanted another lover to comfort him, sensible Hetta argued. Being second-best would feel more hellish than being alone with all these feminine longings and frustration when she sought her lonely bed tonight. No, it was time she got back to real life and forgot Magnus Haile and her odd welcome to a country that had never felt like home to her.
‘Reassure your master, once he is refreshed and well enough to listen properly, that I never gossip,’ she said with a nod to say You can trust me. The lad returned with a wary Maybe I can nod back.
‘Heaven send I never see you or your brat again to test you on that assertion, ma’am,’ Magnus Haile said as if her words had woken him from a stupor. He looked so revolted by the idea that she felt stung, but before she could summon up a sharp answer he marched off as if it was her fault he had suffered such a felling blow at his ex-lover’s hands today.
‘The feeling is entirely mutual,’ she muttered into the damp and empty air even as she gazed at his fast-retreating back and noted his loping stride had already taken him well out of hearing distance, proving he had more energy than she’d thought. ‘Of all the rude, abrupt, bad-tempered m-m-monsters...’
No, that won’t do. Hetta stopped herself in mid-stammer as words failed her. She refused to let him take words away from her, even if he wasn’t here to sneer at her. An ill-mannered, bad-tempered, unshaven and arrogant apology for a gentleman would not turn her back into the silenced little mouse she’d nearly become under her grandmother’s roof when Papa had sent her back to England after her mother had died and he didn’t seem to know what else to do with his only child.
Back then the Dowager Lady Porter was determined to turn her skinny, suntanned and rebellious grandchild into a meek and mild young lady who did as she was told without questioning why. Why on earth Hetta’s father thought a stay under his mother’s roof for Hetta and his grandson would work this time, she had no idea. It was a disaster last time and, after enduring two years of being forever in the wrong, Hetta had been desperate enough to elope with the first man who had asked her to in order to avoid spending one more day under her rigid and forever disapproving grandparent’s roof. This time she had a bright and rather rebellious seven-year-old son with her as well and felt no more inclination for polite society than she had last time she had to live with the Dowager Lady Porter. Sir Hadrian Porter had made the arrangement behind Hetta’s back, though, leaving her no chance to refuse and stay on the other side of the Channel while he was in England.
He didn’t even tell her about his plans to keep her out of the way this time until France was fading from view and