Cottage by the Sea (13 page)

   Indeed, if Blythe Barton was wed to Christopher Trevelyan, the customs men would be forced to keep scores of smacks and sloops patrolling the coast from Plymouth to Land's End. Even those fool functionaries sent down from London town knew that the weather in these parts was often too foul for that!

   But did Collis Trevelyan and his accomplices realize that she would absolutely refuse to marry Kit, that tongue-tied simpleton? Blythe wondered silently, declining to debate Garrett any further. And when it came to Kit's dashing younger brother, did any of them—including Garrett lying moodily beside her in the hayloft—have any idea how seriously she intended that Ennis should be her bridegroom instead?

   Blythe seized a blade of straw between her fingers and stared at it, deep in thought. Perhaps if she was very clever, a bargain could be struck with an avaricious man like her guardian. She turned and glanced sideways at her would-be rescuer. It was very dear of Garrett to play her knight in shining armor, but she had no intention of abandoning Barton Hall. She would retain her homestead and acquire the husband of her choice!

   "Blythe Barton, you impertinent chit!" a voice bellowed from outside the castle wall at the far end of the stable yard. "Where are you? Come inside the house this instant!"

   "God's eyeballs!" Blythe whispered hoarsely, tossing another layer of hay on top of them both. "I fear they've caught us out!"

   "Shhh! Lie still!" Garrett hissed. He flung one arm across her bosom to prevent her from making the slightest movement that might give them away. She felt a stab of fear as she recognized the voice shouting for her attention. Her game of hide-and-seek had suddenly turned deadly serious. Collis Trevelyan was demanding to know where his ward had hidden herself, and woe betide anyone who was interfering with his mission.

   "How did you know old Collis would call the question today?" she asked in a low voice.

   "He was at the bookshop this morning," Garrett murmured, referring to the small establishment run by his father on a narrow street in Gorran Haven.

   "And was my guardian bragging to your father about his intention to increase his estate at my expense?" she whispered hoarsely.

   "That he was," Garrett answered in an undertone.

   Both Blythe and Garrett were woefully aware that such intimate confidences took place only because Collis Trevelyan and Donald Teague had both married Swink sisters, rendering them brothers-in-law. Thanks to such twisted branches in the Teague family tree, this coupling with the Swink clan had condemned Garrett and the rest of the family to play the role of "poor relation" to one of the largest landowners in Cornwall.

   "I heard Uncle Collis say that he intends to have your wedding banns read at St. Goran's Church within the month," Garrett revealed gruffly. "Either we flee, or you are destined to be Kit's bride."

   Those damnable Revenue Men! Blythe fumed. If it weren't for their prying eyes and repeated fleecing of Cornwall to pay for their misbegotten wars and adventurers, Collis Trevelyan wouldn't be in such a lather to consummate this match.

   Suddenly another angry outburst interrupted Blythe's seething reverie.

   "Blythe!" Collis Trevelyan shouted from the other end of the stone barn, causing her to wonder if the voluble man wouldn't one day fall dead in an apoplectic fit.

   "There must be something I can do, short of fleeing the country!" Blythe protested in a hoarse whisper.

   "Well, there's not!" Garrett hissed. "Be still or he'll hear us!"

   "So that's where you are!" a second, softer voice now exclaimed below their loft. "Oh, Blythie, my darling, are you ever in the soup! I'm coming up there to protect you from the wrath of my da."

   The sounds of someone scrambling up the ladder were followed by the sight of a dark-blond head peering into the gloomy hayloft.

   "
I've
seen to Blythe's protection, Ennis," Garrett declared hotly as his uncle Collis burst forth with a string of epithets in the stable below.

   Ennis Trevelyan crawled across the loft to where they both still lay covered in straw.

   "Blast and bother, Ennis!" Garrett whispered. He sat up and attempted to brush the stubble from his hair and clothes. "You'll give us away!"

   "I fear my father plays no games this day," Ennis said, suddenly serious. "You'd both best come down before he finds you here lying in the hay."

   "No!" Garrett insisted, sotto voce.

   "Really now, Blythe," Ennis coaxed, switching tactics to address her in his customary teasing tone, "I know you can't stand the sight of dear brother Kit, but I've always assumed you were bewitched by me, not my bookish cuz here!"

   He had come to rest on his haunches beside them, looking like a well-satisfied pasha. His riding breeches were pristine and clung impressively to his well-formed thighs. The eighteen-year-old's fashionably cut burgundy-colored coat was immaculate. As Blythe gazed into his face, she judged it extraordinarily handsome by virtue of his straight nose, perfectly rounded chin, and a mouth whose engaging smile was as much due to a small scar received in some childhood romp as to his strong, even teeth. A worm of doubt began to eat at her. Would she never be his bride? Could his father actually force her to the altar of St. Goran's and compel her to wed Kit instead of Ennis? Would her mother stand by and permit it?

   "Garrett says your father schemes to—" Blythe began.

   "Who's up there?" an angry voice demanded from directly below the loft. "I want whoever's up there to come down here immediately!"

   Finally the trio gave up. They descended the ladder and stood sheepishly in the stable in front of a supremely agitated Collis Trevelyan, looking like guilty five-year-olds rather than the confident young adults they had become.

   "Ennis, where's your brother?" Collis snapped.

   "Here I am, Father," a voice replied.

   Christopher Trevelyan, having recently celebrated his nineteenth birthday fighting for his life against the smallpox, stood in the stable door. Blythe assumed he had been drawn to the scene by the sound of his sire's fulminations. The dim light cast a merciful shadow over the deep scars that pitted a face which, under happier circumstances, might have pleased some young ladies she knew, though certainly not to the same extent his talented, charming younger brother did.

   Blythe could see that Kit looked as miserable to be

summoned to this revolting parley as she was. She judged that the eldest Trevelyan son habitually held himself apart out of simple shyness and in reaction to an overbearing father who dominated every room he entered. Kit's dark-blond hair was the same shade as that of his fellow Trevelyans, but it was already thinning at the temples and lacked the sheen of good health. The heir to his family's estate wore the modest attire of a farmer. His clothing was more mundane, even, than the plain-cut breeches and coat that their hotheaded, impecunious cousin Garrett was forced to don by virtue of his family's limited financial circumstances.

   Giving Christopher his due, Blythe reflected, poor old Kit would one day make a fine landowner when he inherited his father's holdings. The young man actually enjoyed supervising both fieldwork and sheep raising—and dressed accordingly.

   "Blythe Barton, look at you!" Collis said grimly. Next his angry stare fell on Garrett and Ennis. "There's been no slap-and-tickle going on, has there?" he thundered. "I should hope you've not turned the chit into damaged goods?"

   Blythe's neck and face flushed scarlet in response to her guardian's accusations. Ennis merely grinned, and Garrett stared sullenly at his boot tops, while Kit pursed his lips into a thin line.

   "No, Father," Ennis said with a deprecating laugh. "We were just having a bit of fun, like the old days—"

   "Well, you're not children anymore," Collis barked, "and I would thank you all to remember that!" He glared at Blythe. "And I don't appreciate your disappearing, missy, the moment we come to call. Blythe… Kit… you shall come inside with me." Collis Trevelyan's fit of temper had mottled his face various shades of crimson. He waved a dismissive hand toward Garrett. "Aren't you needed in your father's shop, boy?" Then his glowering gaze absorbed Blythe and Garrett's disheveled appearance. Meanwhile Ennis had somehow managed to remove all traces of his sojourn in the straw. "Be gone with you, Garrett, as your manners are so lacking! As for you, Ennis—"

   In the midst of this tirade Ennis had pulled out a small sketching pad and was drawing the contours of Collis's livid countenance, which served only to make his father more incensed.

   "Put away that useless nonsense and wait for us in the sitting room until I have finished with this business!"

   The dispirited bunch trooped out of the stable and scattered in all directions. Blythe watched Garrett stalk along a narrow path leading toward the village. Then, in what was clearly a meaningless act of rebellion, the seventeen-year-old turned his back on Gorran Haven and headed toward the coastline path that bordered the sea.

   As for Blythe, she already felt like the prisoner she would soon become if she didn't follow Garrett's advice and run away. She soon found herself being herded into Barton Hall alongside the cheerless, pockmarked soul whom her guardian decreed would be her mate for life.

"You will wait here until we summon you, minx," Collis commanded, pointing to a straight-backed chair outside the library that had once served as her father's inner sanctum.

   As soon as the paneled door had closed behind her purple-faced guardian and his hapless son, Blythe stealthily tiptoed toward the keyhole. Squatting on her heels in a most unladylike fashion, she squinted through the narrow gap. Unfortunately her view was blocked by the wide expanse of Collis Trevelyan's high-collared blue coat. However, she could hear the conversation with unnerving clarity.

   "James will have been in the ground a year this November, Rosamund," Collis was saying. "Why not unite the two families immediately and let the mourners be damned!"

   In point of fact, Blythe's mother, Rosamund, had no legal standing in the question of whom her daughter would marry. However, the elder Trevelyan apparently thought it politic to seek the widow Barton's endorsement of his plans. Even so, the unhappy truth was that Blythe was now Collis's legal ward, to be dispatched as he saw fit. Then, once she was wed, her mother would gain a semblance of independence and could either remarry a man of her choice, or end her days in blessed singlehood living in the rose-covered dower house at the bottom of the garden.

   "But would the vicar countenance such hasty nuptials?" Blythe heard her mother say calmly, detecting in Rosamund Barton's inflection her customary irony. The thirty-fouryear-old woman had been a bride at sixteen, a mother at seventeen, and widowed the previous autumn. "I'll grant you, we've dispensed with full mourning attire," she allowed in the distinctive husky voice that, along with her striking figure, had won her late husband's heart, "but 'tis only September, Collis, and a squally month for a wedding."

   "Bah!" Collis spat. "A pox on the blasted weather!" he exclaimed, followed by, "Ah—begging your pardon, Kit, my boy!" He wagged a finger at her mother. "You allowed those Revenue Men to nose around here good and proper, I'll be bound. 'Twas only the hidey-hole here that kept us all safe from being hauled off and locked up."

   "Mrs. Barton faced them alone, Father," Kit ventured cautiously. "I thought she coped admirably with those blighters when they came here uninvited."

   "My point exactly!" Collis exclaimed. "There's nothing you can do, Rosamund, alone here at the Hall when those bastards come snooping about. What you need is a good, strapping son-in-law like Kit here, and stout men, answerable only to us, to be on the lookout for such meddlesome scoundrels. We shan't waste another moment! I've left it to Donald Teague to convince the vicar to marry the pups. Brother Teague will see to it that his brother-in-law adjusts his religious scruples by a couple of months."

   "Who shall tell Blythe?" Kit asked in a low voice.

   "Why, the randy bridegroom, of course!" Collis replied roguishly, slapping his son on the back and sending the recovering invalid into paroxysms of coughing.

   "She won't like it," Kit said, gasping to catch his breath. "'Tis Ennis she fancies."

   "I don't care if she fancies a merino ram!" Collis exploded. "You'll tell her and you'll bed her—before the wedding, if necessary!"

   "Collis!" Rosamund interjected sharply. "My daughter has a right to her tastes in suitors, whomever she may eventually marry. I shall tell her of your proposal."

   "Well, I hope that you inform her that she could do a far sight worse than Kit here," Collis grumbled. "If Vicar Kent can be persuaded to see things my way, this wedding will happen, or there'll be the Devil to pay!"

   During this conversation Kit's face had flushed an unbecoming shade akin to the hue of pomegranate juice. Squinting through the keyhole, Blythe wondered if there could possibly be a more unsightly looking bridegroom in all of Cornwall.

   "'Tis plain she wants Ennis," Kit said stubbornly. "She's always favored him, even before—"