Will landed with a painful thud on his tail bone. Dirt and pebbles rained down on his bare head and his low-crowned beaver hat rolled away over beaten earth to the knees of the young woman crouched in front of him. The young woman with a loose plait of rich toffee-coloured hair over one shoulder, wide brown eyes—and a human skull clutched to her midriff. At which point something bit him sharply on the left buttock.
* * *
There was very little warning, only a long shadow falling across her as a body crashed down into her excavation slicing into the mound. Verity lunged forward, grabbed at the skull and rocked back on her heels as the man landed in front of her with a grunt, one short, sharp Anglo-Saxon expletive and a loud rattle of stones.
Silence. It was neither a thunderbolt nor a fallen angel facing her, either of which might have been easier to deal with. The dust settled, leaving her staring at a fair-haired man, blue eyes narrowed against the light, mouth set with either discomfort or fury. Very likely both. He was dressed in expensive, simple and utterly appropriate country clothing, now filthy.
Utterly appropriate. I know who you are. Oh, no...
His handsome face contorted in a wince of pain and she realised why. As social disasters went, this ranked high.
‘Sir, I fear you may be sitting on a tooth.’
Not the correct form of address, but as we have not been introduced...
Those blue eyes narrowed a little further as he shifted on to his right hip, reached underneath his coat-tails and produced a human jawbone. ‘A tooth? Singular?’ he enquired. Then his gaze shifted to what she was cradling against her bosom. ‘Madam, you appear to be holding a skull. A human skull.’
‘Yes,’ Verity agreed.
Presumably he was being sarcastic with the appear. It could hardly be mistaken for anything else.
‘I am and it is. Is the jawbone undamaged? I mean, are you unhurt?’ There was no really ladylike way of asking a duke if his left buttock had been wounded by an Ancient Briton. It was absolutely out of the question to snatch the jaw from him to check that it was intact. The bone, that is.
‘I am sure it is nothing serious, madam. I apologise for my language earlier.’ It would be much easier to deal with this if he had shown the anger he must be feeling. Or even moaned in acknowledgement of the pain. As it was, the conversation might as well be happening at Almack’s. The Duke shifted his long legs as though to stand.
‘No!’ She took a breath and moderated the volume. ‘Please stay exactly where you are or you will damage the sides. Just allow me to move everything.’ Verity placed the skull carefully in the box of hay she had prepared for it and held out her hand for the jaw. When that was safe she moved back, gathered her skirts around her ankles and stood up.
The Duke, being a gentleman, had averted his gaze. He was probably too cross to consider ogling her in any case. Verity ignored the urge to see exactly what would provoke him into behaving improperly and waited while he rose to his feet in an enviably effortless and controlled manner.
He is the youngest Duke, not yet thirty, and he has no vices to mar that fine figure.
Her cousin Roderick had told her about the man who was now Duke of Aylsham. His reputation had been built up over many years of being merely the impeccable Lord Calthorpe and apparently the man was a byword for acting with absolute propriety under all circumstances.
They call him Lord Appropriate.
Roddy had written that about eighteen months ago, in the course of one of his chatty, gossip-filled letters.
Of course his father the Marquess, is eccentric, to put it very kindly, and his stepmother is a notorious bluestocking, so it was probably a relief to be rescued by his grandfather, who took him to live with him when Calthorpe was a boy.
The old Duke is the stiffest stickler for what is due to his position that you may imagine, but, even so, Calthorpe appears to have gone to extremes to conform. One day he will be the starchiest duke in the kingdom. He has even managed a duel with perfect correctness—a lady was insulted, he issued a challenge, deloped, shook hands with the other man even though he did not delope, merely missed, and refused to gossip afterwards.
Inhuman, I call it.
It seemed she was responsible for shaking an entirely improper oath out of the man, in addition to ruining his lovely but tastefully well-worn clothes, scraping his expensive boots and biting, by proxy, his perfect ducal backside.
And it probably is perfect, judging by how fit he seems. Those thighs...
At least he was capable of standing and nothing appeared to be broken. Verity told herself to wait until after the Duke had gone before she fussed over her careful excavation through the tumulus. ‘You are probably wondering what I am doing?’ she said. The very way he was not looking at her outfit of a plain skirt, laced boots and tweed jacket conveyed perfectly his shock at seeing a gentlewoman so attired. Goodness knew where her straw hat had gone.
‘I was surprised to find my Druidical monument bisected, I must confess,’ he said, perfectly courteous, but without a hint of a smile. ‘I was even more surprised to discover that it was being filleted by a lady.’
Verity opened her mouth, shut it again, taken aback by just how much she wanted to shake the man. He was polite. He was, not to put too fine a point on it, a supremely decorative example of his sex. But all she wanted was to shock another swear word out of him, or a smile, or an admission by so much as a flicker of an eyelid that he had glanced at her ankles as she stood up. His manner was perfectly correct, but she could tell, as clearly as if he had said so, that he thoroughly disapproved of her and thought her occupation bizarre and unseemly.
Oh, the horror of it! A female engaged in an intellectual pursuit involving engaging her brain and getting her hands dirty! Civilisation as he knows it will probably come to an end at any moment.
‘I am sorry to contradict you, sir, but it is not your monument, it is our monument. I have been most careful to excavate a section through this side of it only. My side. I am not convinced it has any connection at all with the Druids and I am most certainly not filleting it. This is a precise excavation conducted according to the most modern antiquarian principles. I can lend you the relevant papers on the subject if you are interested.’ She smiled, the kind of winsome, ladylike smile she had once reserved for tea parties at the Bishop’s Palace before Papa retired. The Duke was an intelligent man, she was sure. He would recognise a lightly disguised snarl when he saw one.
The contrast between her words and the smile made him narrow his eyes, presumably in displeasure. ‘Your side? This land belongs to you?’
Verity pointed to the one remaining post sticking out of the crown of the mound, twelve carefully measured inches back from the edge of her cut. ‘That is the remains of your fence.’
His lips tightened. Did he think that was an implied rebuke about the state of his boundaries? ‘I fear I should have introduced myself earlier.’ He removed his gloves, produced a vast and spotless white linen handkerchief, wiped his hands free of the dirt that had penetrated despite them and held out the right one to her. ‘I am Aylsham.’
‘I had guessed as much, Your Grace.’ Verity swiped her hand over her skirt and took his. ‘I am Miss Wingate.’ She retrieved her fingers rather abruptly. ‘My father is the Bishop of Elmham—the retired Bishop, that is. The current incumbent’s country seat is nearer the county boundary, but the Old Palace actually belongs to Papa. He bought it from the Church Commissioners when he was recovering from his stroke. They thought it too antiquated for present times, but we are very fond of it.’
She was talking too much and recognising why was no help.