“Oh, aye, the Duke of Strachen’s three sons, as wild a little pack of ruffians as you can imagine,” he said fondly. “We fair raised ourselves in the country, you know, without much guidance or interference, and turned out deuced fine in the end, too.”
“Surely your father could claim his share of the credit,” she said, only half in jest. His father had been a duke, after all, a peer, and only a step or so below the king himself.
But clearly he didn’t agree. “My father had other occupations that kept him in London,” he said, his expression abruptly losing all its merriment and closing against her. “His sons were not among his favorite interests.”
“I am sorry,” she said softly, realizing too late that she’d inadvertently misstepped. “The love of your parents—that’s a precious fine thing for a child.”
“I would not know,” he said curtly, his face once again the stern officer’s mask, impersonal and un-emotional. “Shall you accompany me to Feversham now, Miss Winslow?”
“Have I a choice, Captain My Lord?” she asked, made wary by his sudden shift of moods.
“You are a servant, not a slave,” he insisted impatiently, though that insistence was enough to make her believe otherwise. “This is England, not the Indies. But you will oblige me greatly by remaining as Feversham’s housekeeper.”
A servant, not a slave, and the formality of obligation: how quickly things had changed between them, and how wrong for her to dare dream they’d ever be anything else. She sighed, looking away from him and out towards the sea.
She wanted to stay at Feversham, not only because it would make her work with the Company easier to continue, but also because, in her heart, she could not imagine herself anywhere else. Besides, where would she go with her little chest of gold and silver coins, squirreled away against the future? The captain had been right when he’d said her father would expect to find her there when he returned, and she wouldn’t dare disappoint him.
Yet what would it be like to live in the same house with this man—a man this handsome, with moods and a temper as unpredictable as the weather, a man whose authority would pose a constant risk to her and the others in the Company, a man whose charm had already made her drop her careful guard with unsettling ease?
A man who would hold all the keys to her life in his palm, and not even realize it?
“You will, of course, continue with the same wages, as well as the same quarters and entitlements,” he was saying, in the brusque voice that she was sure he used for giving orders on board ship. “There is much to be done at Feversham, and at last there will be sufficient hands to do it. That much at least you should find pleasing. You may also find changes in how the house is governed and arranged that may be less agreeable, and I trust you shall adjust. But as you have noted yourself, Miss Winslow, Feversham has always been your home, and I won’t have it said that I drove you away.”
Her smile was tight and sad, regretting what she could never have. It didn’t matter how many brothers he had, or what they’d called him as a boy. He was still Lord Captain Claremont, and she was still a servant, and so it would always be.
“You are kind to think of me, Captain My Lord,” she murmured. The kindness and understanding he’d shown her was still there, if not the fleeting, misinterpreted friendship. “I am grateful for the concern you show to me.”
“Kindness, hah.” He shook his head, as if to shake away the very notion of such a maudlin weakness. “What has kindness to do with any of this? It is the Trelawneys who have tied our hands together, Miss Winslow, those blasted Trelawneys and their confoundedly meddlesome interference. Surely you are sensible enough to see that.”
“The Trelawneys?” she asked, surprised once again, something that seemed to happen far too often with him. “The Trelawneys have never interfered in anything to do with Feversham.”
Another puff of wind tugged at his hat, and irritably he shoved it down more firmly onto his head.
“They have in this,” he answered, “as you would have known if Potipher had bothered to write that infernal letter. The Trelawneys had such regard for your loyalty that they refused to sell Feversham to me or anyone else unless I agreed to keep you on as long as you pleased. There, that’s the cold truth of it, and God take me for a simpleton this instant for having signed my name to such a scrap of foolery.”
“Then that is the only reason I am to stay at Feversham?” she asked, not wanting to believe what she couldn’t deny. “Because you could not have the house unless you took me with it, like any other old kettles and dunnage?”
“I told you earlier, Miss Winslow. I won’t have it said that I turned you out from your home.” He held his hand out to her. “Now will you come with me back to Feversham?”
She looked at his offered hand, more imperious than gallant, the way she supposed he’d always been if she’d but bothered to see it.
“Thank you, no, Captain My Lord,” she said, already turning to leave him, the way she should have done an hour before. “I have my own pony waiting for me. For you see, I won’t have it said that I’ve ridden with you.”
With a glass of the fine French brandy he’d found in the kitchen cradled in his fingers, George sprawled in a leather armchair before the grand sweep of windows in his bedchamber, the same windows that had convinced him to buy Feversham. The view of the Channel and everything else he could see now belonged to him, as much as the sea ever belonged to anyone. But this room, and the chair in which he sat, and the rest of the timbers and stone and plaster around him were indisputably now his. This was what he’d wanted, what he’d dreamed of, what he’d had to suffer and survive a great many years of war and hardship and receive a huge dollop of luck to achieve.
So why, then, did it all feel so damned hollow?
“Do that be all for the night, Cap’n My Lord?” asked Leggett, waiting by the door with the tray from supper in his hands. A stout, ginger-haired seaman of indeterminate age from Northumberland, Leggett had been George’s manservant since he’d made captain and become entitled to such a personal luxury. Like most seaman turned servants, Leggett was more independent than his landlocked counterparts, and considerably more outspoken, believing it to be his entitlement as a free Englishman to tell his captain what he needed to hear.
And from the way Leggett was now scowling and puffing out his ruddy cheeks, George was sure he was going to exercise that right once again.
“That will be all for the evening, Leggett,” said George wearily, hoping that might be enough to stall the man’s comments until morning, for he was in no humor for either company or conversation. “You and the others turn in. We’ll begin in earnest in the morning.”
“Beg pardon, Cap’n My Lord,” said Leggett, purposefully ignoring George’s broad hint. “There be one thing the lads wanted me to say.”
George sighed, twisting in his chair to face the other man. “Is it your quarters? The food?”
“Nay, nay, Cap’n M’Lord, they all be more than fine,” said Leggett hastily. “Fancy beds like them for the likes o’ us, eh?”
“Then what the devil ails you, man?”
Leggett gave another contemplative puff to his cheeks. “It be the lady, the one what we saw in the village. She be the same one what lives here, don’t she?”
“Miss Winslow has been the housekeeper here at Feversham for some years, yes,” said George, weariness sliding into testiness. “Not that she’s any concern of yours.”
“But she do be our concern, Cap’n M’Lord,” said Leggett doggedly. “Everywhere’s we look about this house, her mark be there. Womenfolk don’t like having their ways changed,