Lady Silence (10 page)

Katy sat tall in the saddle of the her dainty
bay mare and gazed down at Farr Park. From here—from this very
spot—she had first seen the solid rectangle of the house, the drive
lit by torches, the sturdy stables off to one side beyond the
gardens. With snow stinging her face, hunger in her belly, and
despair in her heart, she had stumbled to the top of this hill . .
. and found paradise. Warmth, food, kindness. A lightening of her
soul.

A home.

And now she must risk it all on a visit to
Castle Moretaine. For no excuse was sufficient to explain a refusal
to accompany Lady Moretaine. When forced to live in close confines
with The Dreadful Drucilla, the countess needed her support. Yet
for both the dowager and herself, Katy feared the results. There
was something ominous afoot, as if a storm cloud were moving in—now
just a wisp of gray here and there, but presaging a great mass of
shadows yet to come.

Surely not. Her childhood fears were rearing
their heads, expanding into monsters . . .

No, indeed. The fears of those last
months of her childhood
were
monsters. Else she would not have run away. Would not be
here, gazing down so longingly, so lovingly, at her
refuge.

But with Damon Farr in residence, was it
still a refuge? Surely the most diabolical mind could not have
devised a more clever trap. And she, fancying herself the most
clever of mice, was attempting to spring the trap and seize the
cheese without damage to her person.

Katy slumped in the saddle, glowering at the
corner of the great house that housed the bookroom. Colonel Damon
Farr thought her an adventuress. Lower than a servant. A
convenience to be used and discarded at will. They might have
agreed to a truce, but it was tenuous at best. She’d caught the
assessing glances, the speculation, the flashes of disgust when he
realized what he was doing.

Undoubtedly, the colonel had been raised with
all the tenets of honor, duty, and gentility, but Katy suspected a
good deal of his better nature had been stripped away in the
crucible of war. The Damon Farr of the present was quite capable of
making use of her skills and contemplating other, more intimate,
services, even as he thought her a scheming adventuress.

Perhaps
because
he thought her an
adventuress.

The saddest part was, he would not be far
from wrong.

“
You have become a statue,
Snow.”

She had heard him coming, had known he would
stop and speak to her. Had felt her heartbeat quicken, her breath
shorten, even as she kept her eyes fixed on Farr Park below.

“
A lovely sight,” he
offered.

A double entendre? Did she want him to
be looking at her as he said it, not at Farr Park.
Haymarket Ware
, whispered the
breeze.
Ha-aymarket Wa-are.

“
Look at me, dammit!”

Katy’s hands jerked, her mare caracoling
close to edge of the steep drop-off. The colonel, grabbing the
bridle, towing Katy’s horse back from the brink. “Idiot female,” he
roared, “you shouldn’t ride if you can’t control your horse. I’ve a
good mind to forbid it.”

She
was the
idiot? When he had gone from caress to bark in the space of
seconds, startling her no end. The man was impossible, with no way
to tell what he would do next. The drunken but carefree young man
she remembered would never have treated her so. But that man had
been lost in the war, with only a rare glimpse surfacing in the
grim, reclusive officer who now lived at Farr Park.

Katy patted her mare’s mane, attempting
to coax a calm in her mount she could not feel herself. She squared
her shoulders, looked her Nemesis straight in the eye.
See . . . my head is up, my pride
intact.

“
We will be leaving for Castle
Moretaine sooner than expected,” he told her, still frowning. “I
have had a letter from my brother’s steward informing me that
Moretaine has cut short his shooting trip. It seems he took a chill
in the confounded Scottish weather, and, rather than staying by the
fire to recover, he wishes to return home. He should, in fact, be
in residence by the time we arrive. Naturally, my mother is anxious
to attend him. As a child, Ashby was ever subject to inflammations
of the lungs.”

Even as Katy nodded her understanding, she
was urging her mare forward. Her mistress, not trusting The
Dreadful Drucilla to attend her son, would be frantic with
worry.

The colonel grabbed her bridle. Katy rocked
in the saddle. Glared.

“
You will listen to me carefully,
Snow,” said the colonel, towering over her on his black stallion.
“You will efface yourself at Castle Moretaine, be no more than a
dark wraith trailing in my mother’s wake. No stylish gowns, no
winsome smiles, no putting yourself forward. You will remember that
you are nothing, a product of the gutter raised to the astonishing
heights of upper servant solely by my mother’s
generosity.”

Katy stared at him, trying not to blink.
Attempting to appear stoic when her face threatened to crumple
under his onslaught. When she longed to open her mouth and howl,
say it wasn’t so.

“
According to my mother, my brother’s
wife does not associate with servants. She does not wish to see
you, hear you, or acknowledge your existence. You are dust beneath
her feet. Is that clear?”

Katy’s anger faded, just a trifle, for most
certainly she did not wish to be seen. Greatly daring, she raised
cupped palms before her face, pantomiming the reading of a
book.

The colonel appeared thoughtful. “If our stay
is a lengthy one,” he ventured, “I will wish to work on my book.
You may assist me. And if you are asking if you may read, I see no
reason why you may not,” he added magnanimously. “Though you are
warned not to do so in front of Lady Moretaine. The younger
countess,” he clarified, as Katy’s brow wrinkled in a puzzled
frown.

She patted her mare’s withers, raised her
brows.

“
As for riding . . . I suppose it may
be arranged—if I make the request directly to Moretaine. He’s an
obliging fellow, for all his poor taste in women.”

Ashby
. Damon
tried to picture the older brother he had not seen since he left
for the Peninsula. Ashby had been about the age he himself was now.
An earl. A great prize on the marriage mart. Always a bit too thin,
too solitary, serious to the point of pomposity. Although he
performed his duties as earl with punctilious attention, he had had
to be pushed into the London social scene by his mama and, later,
by his brother, who had been as outgoing as the earl was
reserved.

When Damon was on the Peninsula, however, his
mama had written of Ashby’s transformation after his marriage to
the most sparkling diamond of the Season of 1811. Ashby had become
quite the man about town, she declared, pleased that her eldest had
blossomed at last.

And now look at
us
, Damon thought in disgust.
Moretaine is disillusioned, haring off to Scotland to flee
The Dreadful Drucilla, and I have become a worse recluse than my
brother ever thought of being
.
A fine pair, we are
.

Ashby had always admired his quiet,
responsible older brother, without ever feeling the least desire to
stand in his shoes. He had, in fact, rejoiced in his freedom to be
the carefree young man about town and, later, in his freedom to
choose a life of adventure in the cavalry. Until that long, bloody
day in June when there was nothing left on the battlefield but a
sea of the dead and dying—red coats, blue coast, green coats,
horses . . .

He’d known Waterloo was the end. Honor be
damned, he never wanted to see a battlefield again.

He was damaged. He knew that, even though
he’d never admit it. Even his love for his mother was somehow . . .
remote. He couldn’t, wouldn’t, care about people, because it hurt
too much when he lost them.

And that included Katy Snow.

Katy
. Damon’s
thoughts thumped back to the present. The little minx was still
there, regarding him with anxious eyes. Such a tasty little morsel.
Drucilla would snap her up in a single mouthful. A pity his mother
would defend the little baggage as fiercely as a bear guards its
cub. Life without Katy Snow would be so much more . . .
peaceful.

“
Be sure your dressmaker delivers your
new gowns immediately,” he snapped. “You have only today and
tomorrow to pack.”

After acknowledging his order with a curt
nod, Katy turned her mare and rode off down the winding path that
led to Farr Park. Damon watched until she disappeared from sight
into a small copse at the base of the grassy hill. A puzzle . . .
an irritant . . . an intrigue. Temptation. That was Katy Snow.

~ * ~

Katy laid the last of her four new gowns on
her bed, then stepped back, examining them with critical intensity.
Two dirt brown, a gray that was nearly charcoal, and a dark blue.
High in the neck, long in the sleeve. She scowled.

“
They ain’t—aren’t—so bad,” said Clover
Stiles. “Quality cloth, and, see, there’s a bit of trim on each.
Piping, tucks, a dab of lace on the blue.”

Katy heaved a sigh, shoulders and bosom
heaving, though not a sound escaped her lips. Reluctantly, she
nodded. It wasn’t as if she wished the occupants of Castle
Moretaine to notice her. These gowns were perfect for her purposes.
But . . . she was eighteen, and if what she felt for the difficult
colonel was not love, it was as close to that emotion as made no
difference. She was young, her mirror told her she was lovely, and
she had given up hiding her light under a bushel long since. And
now she was expected to efface herself, fade into the paneling as
if she did not exist. Well, these gowns would certainly do it. The
Dreadful Drucilla was not the only person for whom she wished to be
invisible.

“
Oo-oo, I knew it!” Clover exclaimed.
“It ain’t all vanity, is it, my girl? You’re thinking you won’t cut
such a dash before the master. Well, let me tell you, Katy Snow,
it’s grateful you should be, for, like I’ve told you time and
again, no good can come of him noticing you’re beautiful. Men like
that sample the wares and move on. The very best you can get is a
few months in a rose-covered cottage before he tires of you and
passes you on to one of his friends. Or maybe leaves you flat to
fend for yourself. Or with a bun in the oven and no place to go but
the workhouse. And you can stop glaring at me, ’cuz that’s just
what’ll happen if you don’t take off the blinders and see life as
it is. You can’t have him, and there’s an end to it. Though the way
he is now,” Clover added a shade less brusquely, “’Tis hard to
understand why you’d want him.”

Agreed
. If she
had not known what it was to suffer, she might be repulsed by the
colonel’s glowering ways. Instead . . .

Katy turned her head away from Clover’s
astute gaze, idly fingering the narrow white lace at the cuff of
the dark blue dress. The maids’ uniforms at Farr Park had more
trimming than this, the least drab of her new gowns. She hated
them. She welcomed them. For now was the time to put away her
fantasies, to find a way to be in a room, yet not part of it. To be
so dull and inconsequential that no one noticed her.

She had guarded her virtue well through the
years, aided by Lady Moretaine and Farr Park’s staff, but
reputation was the least of her worries at the moment. There might
be those who put virtue above survival, but Katy was quite certain
that those who whispered of a fate worse than death had never had
to survive the slightest buffet of ill-fortune. Katy knew better.
Death was forever. There were fates worse than loss of virtue.

So she would wear these ugly gowns and sit in
the shadows because the alternative was discovery. Pain,
humiliation, suffering in mind and body.

But never enough to prefer death. She was a
survivor. She was Katy Snow.

No, she
wasn’t
. It was a lie. Her whole life at Farr Park, a
lie.

“
Should have ordered more while we was
in town, sir,” said Benjamin Briggs, the colonel’s valet, shaking
his head over the few garments laid out for packing. Briggs, yet
another indication that his employer’s heart did not match his
hardened exterior, was an ex-soldier fallen on hard times, whom
Damon had somehow acquired between Dover and Farr Park, as his
former valet had long since procured a place elsewhere. “You was a
boy when you left home, colonel. There’s nothing from the old days
as fits exceptin’ your cravats. Mayhap your dress
uniform?”

“
No!”

Briggs, a burly man of medium height with
both face and temperament of a bulldog, persisted. “From what I
hears in the kitchen, colonel, that there lady, your brother’s
wife, is right partic’lar about how folks look. Her husband being
an earl an’ all. Maybe you should have the little miss write to
that Weston—”

“
If I desire new clothes, Briggs, I am
quite capable of ordering them myself.” Damon scowled at the
fashionable wrinkle he’d been attempting to put into his cravat
before descending for dinner. He used to know how to manage the
demmed things—had, in fact, thought he recalled the skill quite
competently—until he had looked at himself through the critical eye
of Drucilla, Countess of Moretaine.

Briggs snapped to attention. “Yes, sir,
o’course, sir.” Eyes straight front, he added, “Just thought what
with you going to a castle and all . . .”