Slightly Scandalous (30 page)

"The dower house in the valley is a pleasant-looking place," Eve said.

"How prettily your sister plays, Lady Freyja," the marchioness said, raising her voice. "And what beauty she possesses. I daresay she will be married before next summer. All the prettiest girls are snatched up young."

"If they choose to be snatched, ma'am," Freyja said. "I am not sure Morgan is one of their number."

"And you, Lady Constance," Eve continued, "what are your plans now that your mama's year of mourning is drawing to an end? A Season in London, perhaps? Provided Freyja and Joshua are married before the spring, Freyja will be able to sponsor you if your mama still does not feel up to it."

Yes, Freyja thought, smiling to herself, Eve was quite as formidable as any of them.

"It is time you went back to the nursery, Prudence," her mother said in the little-girl whine Freyja remembered so well from Bath.

"Come, Prue." Eve got to her feet and drew the girl to hers. "It is high time I went up and read a few stories to Becky and Davy before tucking them in for the night. Would you like to hear some stories too?"

Later, after the gentlemen had come to the drawing room and they had all taken tea and prolonged the conversation for a while, the marchioness suggested an early night, which she was sure they would all welcome after such a long journey.

"And I am quite weary myself, I must confess," she said, "from all the excitement of welcoming dear Joshua home, where he belongs, and his dear betrothed and her family too."

No one voiced any objection. It really had been a lengthy journey. But Joshua was not ready to retire yet, it seemed.

"Would you care for a breath of fresh air first, Freyja?" he asked.

"Oh, but Joshua, dear," his aunt said faintly, "Lady Freyja would need to take her maid with her."

Alleyne grinned and waggled his eyebrows at Freyja.

"She will be with her betrothed, ma'am," Aidan said, sounding wonderfully arrogant and starchy. "There will be no need of a chaperone."

"And even if there were . . ." Freyja said, arching her eyebrows and leaving the sentence uncompleted. "Yes, I would, Joshua, thank you."

It was a chilly night, as befitted early autumn, but it was lovely nonetheless. The sky, which had been so dark earlier while she stood in the bay window of the drawing room, was now star-studded, and the moon shed its light onto the land and gleamed in a wide, sparkling band across the sea and the lower part of the river.

There was a footpath leading along the hillside on a level with the house, bordered by bushes and flower beds on the inner, hill side, and by a waist-high stone wall half-covered with ivy and other plants on the other. Beyond the wall there was another flower border and then lawn sloping down to bushes and the road below. In the summertime, Freyja guessed, this must all be a blaze of color. Even now, and even at night, it was beautiful.

"What a foolish woman your aunt is," she said. "You intended never to come back here, did you not? You would have left her to live out her life in peace here and to rule the household as if it were her own. Yet she had to stir up trouble where there was none."

"And now Morgan is to visit us here frequently in order to paint, Alleyne is to come in order to enjoy my private beach, Aidan is interested in my farms, Eve is planning a come-out Season for my cousins, you are planning to remodel my home, and I am here," he said. "Yes, I suppose that if my aunt could go back and ignore Mrs. Lumbard's letter informing her of my presence in Bath, she would perhaps do so. But perhaps not. She always had to feel in complete control."

"Why did you intend never to come back here?" she asked.

She knew very little about him apart from the fact that he was an amusing, attractive companion. It was strange how one could have known a man in the most intimate way physically and yet not really know him at all as a person. She had not wanted to know him. She still did not. Yet it seemed inevitable now. She had made the impulsive, mad decision to accompany him here, and now she had been drawn inextricably into his life.

"I came here at the age of six," he said, "after my parents had died. I was not even told they were dead at first. I was told they had had to go away for a while. The theory was, I suppose, that I would gradually forget them and would never have to be told the searing truth. But my aunt told me the first time I got up to some mischief here. My parents would be very disappointed to know that they had such a bad little boy, she told me. It was a good thing they were dead and would never know."

"Ah, yes," Freyja said. "It is just the sort of thing the marchioness would say. I hope you told her to be damned."

"I did," he said, "in words far more colorful than that, I believe. But I knew in that moment what the truth meant to me. I had endured until then with all the patience I could muster. I had lived for the day when my mother and father would come for me and take me back home. There was the truly terrifying emptiness of knowing them gone forever. And there was the knowledge that my present life with my uncle and aunt and cousins was my permanent life."

"I hope," she said tartly, fighting pity for the boy he had been, "you were never abject."

He laughed. "Sweetheart," he said, "you are supposed to be in tears of pitying sentiment by now. No, I never was. I made up my mind that if my aunt was determined to think me bad, I would do all in my power to earn my reputation."

"Your uncle?" she said. "Your cousins? Did they share her low opinion of you?"

"My uncle had no choice," he said. "I was bad, Free. I could make your hair stand on end with an account of some of my escapades."

"I doubt it," she said. "I grew up with Bedwyns and Butlers. I was a Bedwyn myself. But in my family we were called high-spirited and mischievous before we were punished. Never bad."

"I rubbed along well enough with the girls," he said. "But they were much younger and therefore were never really my companions."

"I suppose," she said, "your aunt hated you because you were the next heir after her son."

"Undoubtedly." He chuckled.

"Oh," she said as they rounded a slight bend in the path and were suddenly buffeted by the wind. They also had a much wider view of the sea-and the village had come into sight on the opposite side of the river. "Magnificent!"

"It is, is it not?" he agreed.

Yet he had never wanted to come back here.

"What was Albert like?" she asked.

"The perfect son," he said. "He learned all there was to learn from my uncle and helped him with estate business whenever he was allowed. He adored his mother and was attentive to his sisters. He excelled at his studies in school and at university. He was an active member of the church and contributed to every charity that arose. He frequently intervened with his mother on my behalf."

"I would have hated him," Freyja said fervently.

He laughed softly. "Yes," he agreed, "I believe you would."

"And yet," she said, "you were always quarreling with him? You told us so at Lindsey Hall."

"Of course," he said. "Badness usually does not appreciate goodness, Free. I was very, very bad. And Albert was very, very good. He frequently lectured me on goodness, and I just as frequently told him what he could do with his lectures."

His voice was full of his usual careless laughter. It was a mask behind which he hid all the darker shadows of his life, Freyja realized. She had wondered before if the mask hid nothing at all or something. She knew the answer now, though she had not yet penetrated those shadows. She did not want to either. She wanted to be able to remember Josh as a light flirt who during one memorable night had become more to her. She did not want to feel any regrets, any pull of darker memories of a person who might have been worth knowing.

They had walked around another bend in the path. The hillside rose above them here in an almost sheer cliff, and they were again sheltered from the wind. They stopped walking, and Joshua leaned over to rest his elbows on the wall and gaze downward. The moonlight lit his profile. He was smiling.

"If you hated life so much here," she asked him, "why did you stay so long? You left here five years ago. You must already have been-what? Two or three and twenty?"

"Three," he said. "I left Penhallow when I was eighteen. I went to live in Lydmere." He nodded his head in the direction of the village. "I apprenticed myself to a carpenter and learned the trade. I was good at it too. I would have made a decent living from it. I was happy enough, and would have continued to be, I believe."

It was a strange thought that Lady Freyja Bedwyn would never have met Joshua Moore, carpenter, from the Cornish village of Lydmere and would have been unaware of his existence even if their paths had somehow crossed. They would have been from different worlds.

"But then Albert died and you became the heir to all this," she said, "and everything changed."

"Yes." He turned his head to look at her, a strangely mocking smile on his lips. "And then I became Hallmere and could aspire to the hand of a duke's daughter even if only in a fake betrothal. Life is strange, would you not agree?"

But he still had not explained why he had left.

Freyja remembered something then, something she had not particularly noticed at the time. He could no longer remember what he and Albert had quarreled about in the boat on the night Albert died, Joshua had told her family back at Lindsey Hall. How could he not remember? Considering how that night had turned out, surely every last detail must be etched on his memory.

But she would not ask. She really did not want to know-though that was becoming rather a thin argument even in the privacy of her own thoughts.

"Did you not come to Penhallow at all during the years when you were living in the village?" she asked.

"I came once every week on my half-day off from work," he said. "I came to see Prue."

"Poor girl," Freyja said. "Her mother is not at all fond of her, is she?"

"One need never use the word poor to describe Prue," he said. "We tend to view those with physical and mental abilities different from the norm as pitiful creatures with handicaps or disabilities. We talk about cripples and idiots. We view them from our own limited perspective. I once knew a blind person whose sense of wonder at the world put my own limited perceptions to shame. Prue is happy and bubbling over with love-both attributes that many of us allow to lapse with our childhoods. In what sense is she disabled? Or handicapped? Or poor?"

He spoke with an intensity that made him seem unfamiliar to her for a moment. He had been kind and patient with the girl all afternoon as well as during dinner, with no sense of martyrdom or boredom or condescension. Prue had not been the only one brimming over with love. Joshua had reminded her rather strongly of Eve, whom Aidan fondly described as a woman with a bleeding heart and a fondness for lame ducks. Their house was filled with servants whom no one else would employ for one reason or another, including a truly ferocious ex-convict of a housekeeper who would cheerfully die for Eve and whom Freyja admired enormously.

"Perhaps now you have returned," she said, "you will decide to stay-once this nonsense your aunt has been hatching has been cleared up, that is. You would have to have her move elsewhere, of course, but she cannot have been left destitute."

"She has not been," he said. "But she will continue to live here. I will not."

And yet if she were in his place, Freyja thought, she would have to have the satisfaction of ousting the marchioness from Penhallow, of stripping from her all that was not rightfully hers. Even if she did not choose to live here herself, she would not allow the other woman to do so instead. She would enjoy the satisfaction of wreaking some revenge.

But it was none of her business what Joshua did or did not do. He was none of her business.

"A quiet hillside on a starry night," he said, "with the moonlight dancing on the surface of the sea. And a gorgeous woman at my side. Whatever am I about, holding a polite conversation with her and simply admiring the view? I must be losing my touch-and would quickly lose my reputation too if anyone could see me at it." He straightened up from the wall and turned to grin at her.

"You may imagine, if you will," she said, "that my maid is standing a few feet off."

He chuckled softly. "But Aidan said you did not need a chaperone," he reminded her.

"Because Aidan trusted you," she said, "and because he thinks we are betrothed."

"And so we are," he said, "thanks to my aunt and thanks to Bewcastle-and thanks to your decision to accompany me here. Your hair is loose beneath that hood, is it not?"

She had pulled out the pins when she went to her room to fetch her cloak.

"What has that got to do with anything?" she asked haughtily. Now that he had mentioned it, the surroundings were rather conducive to romance-or to dalliance at least. But she had dallied quite enough with Joshua during the past few weeks. They were fortunate indeed that they had not been trapped into having to marry each other. She really ought not to invite any further indiscretions.

But he had closed the distance between them and raised his hands to lift back her hood. Her hair cascaded out about her shoulders and down her back. There was enough wind even in this shaded spot to lift it and waft it about her face.