“Luc, it is unseemly that the servants address us as they do, as though the matter of the inheritance were already settled.”

“I have mentioned this to them several times, to no avail. They seem to have made up their minds on the matter.” His gaze glimmered. “And I have been told that servitude does not always teach a person meekness.”

Her cheeks warmed.

“Now,” he said with a gesture to the horses, “I aim to show you about Combe.” He did not invite her; he expected her compliance.

“I would like that.”

He assisted her to mount, wrapping his hands around her waist and sending her heart into her toes. She longed for the closeness he had given her on the crossing and for his hungry gaze. But he gave her only the most cursory glance as she arranged her skirts about her legs and the horse’s rear, and then he moved to his own mount.

The October day was fine, bright and crisp with only the barest wisps of clouds above the river, and the path was well trodden. It skirted a copse of ash and oaks and cut across a field speckled with sheep toward a farmhouse far in the distance nestled in a nook in the hill. Spread out from the house, regular, carefully furrowed plots sat fallow beside budding crops of winter wheat.

“Combe has been in my family for four centuries, though the present house was built in the time of Elizabeth,” he said. “I thought you might like to pay a call on some of the tenants. The family that lives in the house there, the Goodes, is the most prosperous.” Atop his great black horse, surveying his family’s land, he was at perfect ease, just as he had been on the deck of his ship.

“You seem familiar with the estate. Did you visit here often before you went to sea?”

“Until I was ten years old I lived at Combe with my parents and my brother. My father had a house in the North, but my mother preferred to reside here, where news of France traveled more swiftly from London. It was rarely good news in those days. Not for her family.”

He was silent then, and only the horses’ hoofs in the grass and the chatter of birds and an occasional sheep’s bleat stirred the air.

“When you were ten, did your father move your family to that house in the North or to London?”

“When I was ten my father died in a carriage accident. In her grief, my mother fled to France to take comfort in retrieving her family’s lands from the Jacobins that had come into power. My brother and I were sent to live near London in the house of our aunt’s brother—our uncle the duke being something of an indolent pleasure-seeker and not wanting to be bothered with raising two young boys.”

“It was that guardian you spoke of at Saint-Reveé-des-Beaux, wasn’t it? The man from whom your brother later fled?”

“The very one.” He gestured to a man coming from the farmhouse. “There is Goode now. I knew his father, Edward, when I was a boy. Thatcher has precisely the look of him.”

Thatcher Goode greeted them with deference, then studied her with a shrewd eye. He was neatly dressed and well spoken, but his clothing was worn nearly to threads at the joints and his cheeks were lean. He took them into the house and made known to them his wife and three sons.

The house was bare, the walls stripped of decoration, and the floors cold wooden planks without benefit of rugs. Mrs. Goode offered Arabella tea. The brew was thrice boiled and the biscuits lacked sweetener. Mrs. Goode and the eldest boy watched her carefully and said little.

Riding away from the farmhouse, Luc seemed in a pensive humor and Arabella remained silent.

The next tenant family and their house were much the same.

“Luc . . .”

He lifted his head from a study as they rode toward the bridge that crossed the river. Away in the distance the enormous house on the hill gave no hint of the state of the estate’s residents.

“Duchess?”

“Are they all Quakers?”

His brow drew down. “No,” he said shortly.

“Forgive me. I thought perhaps it might explain the bareness of their homes, and their—”

“Poverty?” The reins were tight in his fist. “No. They are simply poor.”

“But the fields have all been harvested and there must be at least four hundred head of sheep and lambs—”

“It is the first I have seen of it.” He rubbed the scar beneath his hat brim. “But it is worse than I even imagined.”

“You knew of it before?”

“My uncle’s steward reviewed with me the estate’s books last night.” He looked at her. “I regret that I was unable to join you and your sisters for dinner.”

“I should say that Combe’s starving tenants are more important than quails in queen sauce,” she said. “Is Mr. Parsons dishonest?”

“He is frightfully honest. He simply does not know where the tenants’ income is going. He wrote to me monthly before my uncle died, pleading for me to intervene. I could not; I had no authority. And . . .” He paused. “Other matters kept me abroad longer than I intended.”

Matters about which he would not speak with her.

“They are afraid,” she said. “I can sense their fear. And suspicion. But . . . I do not believe it is directed at you.”

He regarded her carefully as their horses clopped across the bridge.

“I—”

“You mustn’t trouble yourself with it,” he said, and turned his face to the road. “I will see to it.”

“I haven’t anything else with which to trouble myself. You have taken me from a life in which I worked every day to a life of thorough leisure. I am unaccustomed to inactivity.”

“In time you will find sufficient diversion.”

He spoke then only of light matters, complimented her on her seat, and later on the gown she wore at dinner and the arrangement of her hair, and she wanted to seize him and shake him back to the moments of candid honesty he had briefly shared with her. Then she wanted him to hold her in his arms and make love to her as he had before, as though he needed her.

But she did not demand his honesty and he did not do as she dreamed. Neither did he invite her to ride out again. The moment of intimacy was gone. She saw him only at dinner when he was all charm to her sisters and all masculine appreciation for her. He was the lord of the manor and she was merely the ornament who shared his house.

Chapter 14

Enticements

Arabella did find many activities with which to busy herself during the days.

“The house has been without a mistress for more than a year,” Mrs. Pickett explained while by the light of candles they sorted through piles of ancient laces and linens, separating the hopelessly threadbare pieces from those that could be salvaged. “I’ve tried to keep all in order, but I wouldn’t presume to make decisions that the lady of the house should.”

Arabella did not bother pointing out that she was not in fact the lady of the house, for she already knew it would have no effect, and instead stifled a yawn. But she was not yet exhausted enough to fall swiftly into sleep. Imagining even a moment lying in bed waiting in vain for him to come to her drove her hands again to the heap of musty table linens. Her sisters had gone to bed, but Mrs. Pickett seemed eager to pursue the project.

“I understand that my husband’s uncle was ill for some months before his death,” Arabella said conversationally.

“Yes, your grace. For fourteen months, in fact, though at the beginning he could still walk about the grounds, of course. It was only in the last months that he grew too ill to leave his chambers.”