Barbara Metzger
Authors: Rakes Ransom
Rake's Ransom by Barbara Metzger
Rake’s Ransom
By Barbara Metzger
Copyright 2012 by Barbara Metzger
Cover Copyright 2012 by Ginny Glass
and Untreed Reads Publishing
The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.
Previously published in print, 2006.
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold, reproduced or transmitted by any means in any form or given away to other people without specific permission from the author and/or publisher. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to the living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Also by Barbara Metzger and Untreed Reads Publishing
An Angel for the Earl
An Enchanted Affair
The Duel
A Suspicious Affair
Ace of Hearts (Book One of The House of Cards Trilogy)
Jack of Clubs (Book Two of The House of Cards Trilogy)
Queen of Diamonds (Book Three of The House of Cards Trilogy)
Father Christmas
Lady Whilton’s Wedding
“Metzger's prose absolutely tickles the funny bone.”
—L.A. Life Daily News
“One of the genre's wittiest pens. Barbara Metzger deliciously mixes love and laughter.”
—Romantic Times
“Fresh, funny, touching, and romantic…one delicious read.”
—Edith Layton
By Barbara Metzger
To Stacy and Jeri, my two favorite nieces, with love
“By all that is holy, Trevaine, you’ve got to do something about that daughter of yours!” If complexion were a barometer of feelings, Squire George Bottwick was in a raging gale of a mood. His round face as red as the scarlet hunt jacket he wore, he stomped into the library of Treverly Hall and pounded on his friend’s desk. “It’s unlawful, unladylike, and…and unEnglish,” he sputtered, the last being the worst, in his view.
Lord Trevaine carefully placed a marker in the book he was reading, laid it gently on the side of the desk farthest from the Squire and, looking up, settled the spectacles on his nose. “Good day, George. I didn’t hear you come in.”
“Didn’t hear me? Didn’t hear me?” roared his guest. “And I suppose you didn’t hear the riot and ruckus outside your front door, not an hour past?”
“Why no, I was studying this passage here. He waved a thin hand in the book’s general direction. “Quite interesting. You see—”
“No, blast it, Elliot, it’s your daughter you should be seeing to, not some demned book. I know I ain’t bookish, but anyone can tell you the chit can’t keep haring around the countryside, riding astride like a boy—”
“She is only seventeen, and it’s safer that way.”
“That’s what you said at fourteen, and fifteen, and sixteen. Man, she’s not a child anymore, to be out with nary a groom.”
“Come, George, nothing is going to happen to her in our own neighbourhood, and she does have her dog for companion.”
“It’s not
her
safety I’m concerned with! And you call that monster a dog! Hellhound more like. Misbegotten whelp of a—”
“Irish wolfhound, actually, for the most part.”
“Aye, part Irish revenge on the English, and part devil. It’s a pretty pair you’ve set loose on us, Trevaine, a ragtag hoyden and a barn-sized bristle brush with fangs. Do you know what they’ve done now? Do you even care? Look at me, Trevaine, just look!”
Squire was still storming around the small room, brandishing his riding whip at a bust of poor blind Homer and challenging the neat stacks of books. His face was still red and his waistcoat, already straining to meet across his more than ample girth, was in danger of surrendering the cause, with all his huffing and puffing. The whole ensemble, in fact, was mud-spattered and wet, with spots, stains and scuff marks. Fox one, locals zero? No, there had to be more to it, Lord Trevaine ruefully acknowledged. There always was, when his daughter Jacelyn was involved. He gestured Squire to the leather seat facing his, while be reached for the cut-glass decanter of fine French brandy he kept on the side table. This was not the first time he had entertained his friend in such a fashion, and he well knew the delaying tactics to let the storm of Squire’s anger blow itself out. While his friend sipped and mopped at his damp brow with a handkerchief, Lord Trevaine steepled his fingers and considered how times like this made him miss his wife more than ever. She had been dead almost ten years now, leaving him the sole raising of their daughter, a sunbeam in his darkened life. Jacelyn was bright and happy and lively and loving, everything her mother would have approved. Perhaps she was a trifle high-spirited, her father admitted, but that was to be expected in a girl surrounded only by doting servants. The rough edges would smooth out in time, he was sure. After all, she was ever kind and tenderhearted. The last thought brought Lord Trevaine back to the present, and his present company.
He cleared his throat. “I take it this has something to do with, er, fox hunting?”
Squire Bottwick sputtered, choking on his swallow. “Were you even aware there was to be a hunt this morning, then?”
“Actually, no. But by your dress…and discomposure…” Lord Trevaine hurriedly refilled the squire’s glass.
He sympathised with the Squire, truly he did, for he knew that what books were to him, fox hunting was to George Bottwick. Squire did not read much more than farming journals, and Lord Trevaine’s uncertain health kept him from the saddle, yet they each respected the other’s ways. Miss Jacelyn Trevaine, however, in the plainest of unvarnished truths, did not approve of fox hunting. Oh, she listened to the arguments of chicken farmers and gameskeepers, but countered with the foxes’ depredations of the far more destructive rodent populations. If, in a rare moment of conciliation, Jacelyn was willing to concede the possible necessity of controlling the foxes’ numbers, she would never, with her last breath if need be, agree to such a brutal, bloody, barbaric method as the hunt. So, with the single-minded dedication of youth and righteous morality, she set out to eradicate the gory sport, or at least make it dashed uncomfortable for the local Master of the Hunt, Squire Bottwick.
One of Jacelyn’s earliest efforts employed a vast quantity of pepper, primitive but effective. Another involved most of the village lads and all the dead fish they could accumulate. Jacelyn strewed the latter over the deer paths and forest tracks, covering whatever scent a fox may have left. That cost many a stand-up supper for the boys, and lost Miss Trevaine her last of many governesses. Whether Miss Polk resigned due to the stench, or well-bred dismay at the deed, or simple acknowledgement that the task of making her charge into a lady was beyond her, her departure freed Jacelyn, at age fifteen, from whatever constraints society was wont to impose on young females. The following season someone managed to keep overfeeding Squire’s hounds with good beef and mutton until they grew too fat and lazy to chase anything more than dream foxes. Bottwick had suspicions, of course, but could never prove them. Lord Trevaine quietly grew fond of omelettes.
Even her loving father felt that Jacelyn had used unfair tactics last year, bringing two orphaned fox kits over to Bottwick’s where Squire’s three little girls, still in the schoolroom, could help care for the “innocent victims” of their father’s bloodlust and butchery. Such whining and weeping had to reach even the hardest heart; Squire discovered business in London.
For all that, Jacelyn never injured the dogs or the horses or their riders, which she could have, setting out traps or deadfalls or draglines across the ridings. No, it was only Squire’s pride—and pleasure—which got hurt. Bottwick seemed relaxed by now, warmed by the fire in the grate and the good brandy, so, taking care to top the glass first, Lord Trevaine cautiously suggested, “I take it you and my daughter had another, ah, confrontation this morning?”
“Confrontation? No, I never saw her but, your daughter or not, if I’d had my hands on her—”
Trevaine cleared his throat.
“—what you should have seen to years ago.” He stomped over to the window, pointed with his wineglass. “Look at it out. Cool, crisp, no rain for the first day this week. Everyone came out for the hunt—not the London crowd; they’ll get here week’s end—but all the local gentry. There we were, assembled in my drive for a stirrup cup to get the blood flowing. Horses pawing, the kennelmen barely holding the dogs, they’re so eager. The trumpet sounds
Away
. Ah, Trevaine, there’s no sweeter sight nor sound than the pack in voice on the trail, gorgeous horseflesh, fine riders. Then my Jasper, the best pack leader I’ve ever seen, starts belling. I can hear it now:
A-roo, A-roo.
And we all follow, through the home wood, across the spinney, over the stream, then cut back through Granders’ and over the bridge at Treverly. We lost the vicar at Four Corners. What a ride! No
View Halloo
though, just the dogs running like the wind…right up to your front door.”
“Hold, George. I know Jacelyn’s got no fox cubs here now, and she could not get your dogs to follow a dead pelt. So what—”
“It wasn’t any damned fox! It was that infernal dog of hers, in season. Anyone with a ha’penny’s worth of sense knows to keep a bitch like that inside, but is that what your daughter does? Oh, no. Miss Trevaine takes the dog, and its bedding, and marks every blasted trail in the neighbourhood, leading every jack dog in the county right to your doorstep and the biggest dogfight you’ve ever read a damned book through. It took all your people and all mine, and buckets of water, just to separate them. Now my Jasper is back in the kennels, howling like some curst Romeo. And there’s nary hide nor hair of missy and the dog, of course.” Squire realised his last bellows were rattling the windowpanes. He wiped his face again, turned and in a quieter voice asked, “What do you think of your sweet, tender-hearted girl now?”
Lord Trevaine coughed to hide his laugh, but he answered, “A trifle indelicate, but ingenious all the same. I’ll make good on any damages, of course.” He refilled the glass.
“You always do. When the dog steals a ham curing in the sun, or attacks some villager’s washline as if it were a row of advancing Frenchies, or when missy talks the tenants’ sons into letting her plough the fields. You’ve got to stop laughing, Elliot. It is different now. Oh, I’ll recover m’dignity, and the dogs will be fit by the house party, and old Reynard can have a rest till then, but it is high time you took your nose out of your books and had a better look around. The tabbies are talking about Jacelyn, and it ain’t good. This morning’s escapade alone will keep them meowing for days.”
“You know better than that, George. I don’t care what the local matrons say, and neither does my daughter.”
“That’s just it, you don’t care. But what’s to become of your daughter, eh? She’s not a little girl anymore. She cannot just stay in Cambridgeshire, sitting at your feet, making Maygames of the locals.”
“Why not, if it suits her? You are just concerned with your own peace of mind,” Trevaine said with a smile.
Squire was thoroughly at ease now—after four brandies anyone else would be comatose—and earnestly tried to make his friend see clear. “Nay, it’s not my comfort, Elliot, but yours. Think on it. You won’t be here to make good for her forever. What then?”
“Then she will be a wealthy young woman, free to make whatever decisions she wants.”