It was a dour thought to try and go to sleep on, so she pushed it aside as best she could for another day. It was time to stop looking back and go into the future as best they could, but she wished she was a wild girl again just for tonight, so she could be free to do as she pleased and walk into the hills one last time by the light of the July moon. She had come to love both the remoteness of this sturdy old house and the half-tamed emptiness of the wide hills all around it and she would miss that and the girls she had done her best to equip for lives that would not always be as easy as they might seem to anyone less fortunate.
So was Gideon struggling to sleep alone as well tonight, or already lost in weary slumber after his demanding wife-hunting trip and last night’s excitements? No, thinking of him asleep without her was never going to lull her into dreamland; it felt too wrong for them to lie apart like enemies in different camps dreading the next battle. She sighed heavily, then went back to bed to try counting sheep. No, they looked too much like Aunt Seraphina, and wasn’t that an uncomfortable thought? Sheep wearing unlikely flaxen wigs and a superior expression would put her off the silly creatures for life and there were far too many of them in this part of the world to risk that calamity.
In the distance she thought she heard a soft thud and a murmur, but it was over almost as soon as it began and she turned over when she heard a vixen bark a warning at cubs big enough to know better by now and blocked her ears to the normal noises of the night. It wasn’t term time, so she didn’t need to worry about nightmares or wakeful girls away from home for the first time and longing for their parents. She felt herself retreating from this little world that seemed so safe for so long, Miss Sommers’s days were numbered, but could she really be Calliope Laughraine again? She had married Gideon ten years ago, but it would feel like living with a man she didn’t know if they took up where they left off. Whatever happened between them, she was about to live in a house beyond most women’s wildest dreams.
The very thought of trying to make some sort of life in the mansion she visited on sufferance as a child felt so alien she might lose an essential part of herself if she tried to see herself as wife of the next Lord Laughraine. Deciding she preferred a world she had some control over, she set about plotting the knottiest bits of her next book in her head. The intricacies of it soothed her and she was halfway to dreamland when she realised her latest hero looked exactly like Gideon. Already drifting, her mind was too wrapped up in a sleepy fantasy of finding a happy ending in her husband hero’s arms to reject the notion he might still be her hero, after all, and she fell asleep with a welcoming smile on her face.
* * *
‘So where did you end up sleeping last night, Gideon?’ Callie asked the next morning when they were on their way from Cataret House so early this might be a dream, as well.
‘On a chair in your office, lest your aunt can pick locks as well as escape from upstairs windows,’ he replied gruffly.
‘I knew I should have woken up properly and investigated the noise I heard in the night,’ she said with a grimace for the empty room and improvised rope of bedsheets they had discovered this morning. ‘At least Kitty wasn’t here to give you a matching pair of black eyes, but I’m surprised you didn’t hear my aunt escape as you seem to have the senses of a cat.’
‘I knew she would go, why else do you think I was dozing in that uncomfortable chair? I had to make sure she took nothing of ours with her this time,’ he said and shifted his shoulders as if they were still stiff from holding such an unnatural position for so long.
‘You have had a difficult time since you arrived, haven’t you?’ she said with a wry smile for his poor bruised face and the shadows even under his good eye from lack of proper sleep. ‘Poor Gideon,’ she added and surely it wasn’t quite right to feel such a rush of joy at the mere sight of the boyish smile she remembered from the old days in response?
‘Lucky Gideon,’ he corrected softly and the look he slanted her made it clear she was the reason he thought it was worth it.
She smiled back and let herself enjoy this odd journey through a luminous dawn. They were sitting on the box of what she still thought of as her aunt’s carriage. As he was driving the sturdy pair she refused to be shut inside a stuffy, swaying box on wheels on such a perfect morning. So the little kitchen maid was inside the coach in her stead, dressed in her Sunday best and feeling like a Queen of England, she assured Callie, and shook her head at an offer to sit in the fresh air, as well.
‘I’ve never rode in a real coach before, miss, I mean, my lady, and the missus would scold me something wicked if she caught me getting that wrong again, wouldn’t she?’ the girl said with a happy grin.
Callie smiled back in silent glee neither of them need tiptoe round her aunt’s notions of propriety ever again. Now she let herself feel the thrill of a new start life in the shape of Sir Gideon Laughraine as well as the fears she struggled with last night. His stray lady was about to be reborn as a potential aristocrat and apparently Biddy was going to scale the dizzy heights of lady’s maid without going through any of the stages in between.
‘She’s never going to fit anyone’s idea of a proper lady’s maid,’ Gideon warned softly as they moved on to the main road to Manydown and Biddy waved regally at a startled farm labourer about to go off to the fields for the day.
‘That’s why I engaged her,’ Callie admitted, the thought of a silently critical dresser who would sniff and disapprove of her new mistress making Biddy’s pleas not to leave her behind a good excuse not to engage one. ‘I couldn’t let her be turned into the world with nothing, now could I?’
‘Perhaps not, but we could still find her a place more fitted to her skills when we get to Raigne. Your personal maid will have to cope with a large collection of gowns and can the girl sew? She won’t know how to clean a riding habit or wash the ostrich plume fashionable females festoon their bonnets with. If all Biddy can do is wash pots and pare vegetables, she’ll be in the suds the first time she’s called on to do something less than straightforward to my lady’s wardrobe.’
‘No, she won’t, suds are what she’s escaping from. For one thing, I’m not a fashionable female. For another, she can sew perfectly well, because my aunt insisted all the maids she employed could do so to save a sewing woman’s wages. I’m sure someone at Raigne will be glad to show her how to keep my habits clean and what to do about anything I manage to spill on my favourite gown and she might as well learn to be a lady’s maid at the same time I find out how to be a lady.’
‘You are already a lady. Let’s not have that old argument again.’
‘Very well, we’ll leave it for another day,’ Callie conceded with a look about her at the early morning sunshine and another fine day. ‘Where do you think my aunt has gone?’ she asked after they had driven through Manydown to startled faces as the early risers saw Mrs Grisham’s niece on the box and Biddy waving regally at them from inside the carriage as if practising for her coronation.
‘How would I know?’ Gideon said as he got the feel of the pair and set them bowling along the better road to the main highway that would lead them to the other side of the county and Raigne, hopefully before the sun could climb too high and make the journey wearisome.
‘You seem to find out what makes a person tick a little too easily nowadays,’ she replied, feeling the tug of intimacy as she adapted to the movements of his strong body brushing hers as he expertly flicked his whip or softly reassured the more skittish of the two glossy chestnut horses he was driving to an inch.
‘I don’t much care where she is or want to understand her,’ he said shortly.
She sensed something held back and turned to give him a very wifely look. ‘Now I’m wondering