Linda Needham (7 page)

H
ollie awoke midmorning, buried to her eyebrows in a marvelously soft comforter, having spent the entire night dreaming of the man in the next room, dreaming of spying on him. Oh, what an astounding part of her dream that had been. And plotting against him, printing riddles on her Stanhope to confuse him, and whispering rhymes to charm him, and every word of it seditious and marvelously stirring.

She needed to find a way to continue her campaign against him in secret, to be close at his elbow when he sorted through the evidence he’d stolen from her shop. But she was fresh out of plans and not yet ready to face the man or to even open her eyes.

Yet she had the oddest feeling that she was being studied at close range. She peeked out from under her lashes, expecting a lounging cat or her frowning magistrate or Mumberton with her morning tea.

But it was the boy, Charles, kneeling on the upholstered bench at the foot of her bed, peering at her over the top of her counterpane like an elf in a woodland grove.

She couldn’t help a smile. “Good morning, Chip.”

His darkly lashed eyes popped wide in wonder. “You know my name?”

“Chip, for Charles, isn’t it?”

“Yup.”

“Mine is Hollie, for Holliway.”

“Hollie? Like a Christmas greening.” His smile was huge and lacked a few teeth.

“The very thing.”

“I saw a deer out my window. He had pointy horns and he was eating the rose bush. Mumberton chased him.”

Hollie laughed and sat up against the dense bank of pillows. “I’d like to have seen that. Where is Mumberton now? Have you escaped him again?”

Chip’s ears pricked up, and he pointed to the doorway just as Mumberton came round the corner, loaded down with a hip bath, followed by what must have been the entire kitchen staff. They carried steaming water to fill the tub, thick
towels, and a heaping breakfast tray.

“What’s all that stuff for, Mr. Mumberton?” Chip plunked himself down on the bench, a little prince overseeing everything.

The man’s shoulders sagged. “Ah, lad, you’re supposed to be eating your breakfast in the kitchen. How the devil did you get in here?”

Chip stuck out his legs, pointed to his bare feet, wriggling his toes. “On these things, sir.”

Hollie nearly laughed. “He’s not bothering me at all, Mumberton.”

But Chip had already zipped out of the room, leaving the butler to stare after him and swab his forehead with his sleeve.

“As I’ve told his lordship every morning and every night for the last three, I’m not a nanny. The lad is wild, and there’s not time enough in the day to follow after him. I’m doing the best that I’m able.”

“I’m sure you are.” He was a dear old man, with bristling eyebrows and cheeks that pinked and a mustache that flicked from side to side when he was flustered—which seemed a constant state, no thanks to Lord Everingham. “The house will adjust to Chip in no time.”

“If he stays.”

What a sad thought—for father and son. “I dearly hope he does.”

“God love us all.” Mumberton rolled his eyes, righted himself from all this confessing, and stood at attention. “His lordship says you’re to
have this gown and apologizes for his absence.” He dropped a pale blue dress on the bench.

“He’s gone?” Vanished in the night? Please God, dragged away to Westminster for a month.

“He’s touring the grounds with his estate manager. Till noon, he said. I’m to inform you that it’ll be this afternoon before the wagons arrive with your belongings. Probably evening or later before someone named Stan Hope arrives.”

“My Stanhope. It’s a printing press. And thank you, Mumberton.”

Mumberton continued with his prepared speech. “In the meantime, his lordship says you’re to have breakfast and make use of the parlor, while he—” Mumberton rattled off a dozen instructions and injunctions from His Bloody Lordship, none of which mattered in the least.

Staying out of Everingham’s clutches did matter, though. If that meant becoming a good little printer, the innocent wife of the infamous Captain Spindleshanks, then she’d do it up with bows and bunting and have him convinced that she was everything he imagined her to be.

She’d start by arranging the gatehouse to her best advantage, her only refuge against Everingham’s prying. Ha! Let him keep her Stanhope under lock and key; there were dozens of ways to dodge around his wards and print whatever she wished.

Mumberton finally left her to her bath, the
purest delight imaginable. The gown that Stirling had sent was a summer-weight spriggy blue, though outside her chamber window the morning was a drippy, foggy mess.

No camisole, no stockings, no shoes. Leave it to a man to ignore everything but the obvious.

She struggled to button her gown at the back but gave up after two buttons. She gulped down her tea, then snagged her breakfast from the tray, raiding Everingham’s dressing closet for socks and an oversized coat that smelled of his bay. Then she found a pair of boots in the greenhouse and set out to find her new home.

The new headquarters for Captain Spindleshanks and his obedient wife.

The gatehouse sat a few hundred yards below the manor and, oddly enough, a quarter-mile from the actual gate and the road.

But it was in full view of Everingham Hall. No doubt that was the reason Everingham had suggested it: so that he could monitor her comings and goings.

And the comings and goings of her husband.

May the both of them meet a prickly end.

It was a thoroughly charming little house from the outside: stone walls and a new slate roof, and a wide covered portico which her carriage must have passed beneath on her way in last night.

The thick, iron-bound door was unlatched and swung easily into a small, richly paneled foyer which then emptied into a good-sized parlor,
with plenty of windows to the southwest and a large hearth, and even a small kitchen beyond. She found an airy bedroom above stairs and plenty of light.

Perfectly lovely in too many ways. The cottage was the most wonderful place she’d ever seen.

Though the furniture was draped in sheets, which made everything appear a bit ghostly, the place was dust-free and welcoming. When she reentered the parlor with a mind to begin settling in, that feeling of being watched came again.

And again a moment later, when she was giggled at from beneath the wriggling sheet that covered an easy chair under the window.

Her new little shadow.

“Aye, me,” she said grandly, creeping up to the chair and its little ghost. “I’m weary to my bones from my long walk.” She yawned loudly and stretched. “I think I’ll sit myself…
here!
”

She pretended to sit on the squirming boy, who screamed in delight and rocketed up to stand on the chair, all legs and arms beneath the sheet.

“I’m here! I’m here!” The boy was hiccoughing with laughter.

“Who be you, oh spirit of the gatehouse?” Hollie found his ribs with her best tickling fingers and he collapsed completely onto the chair.

“It’s me!” He squirmed and laughed and tore
at the sheet, finally yanking it off his head. “Don’t be scared, Miss Hollie! See, it’s me!”

The boy was red-faced and sweaty, his hair sticking up in a hundred different places. Hollie gasped in mock horror and threw her hands across her eyes.

“Oh, oh! Who is me?”

“It’s Chip! You remember from this morning.” He leaped down from the chair and pulled her fingers away from her face. “It’s me, Hollie! Meeeee!”

She opened her eyes to his gap-toothed grin and his apple cheeks and those dark, dark eyes. “Oh, Chip! It
is
you. You scared me!”

“I didn’t mean to, but you scared me too!”

She couldn’t resist brushing the jumble of curls back into place. “You know something, Chip? I sometimes like to be scared.”

He giggled again. “Me too.”

She loved having him here, but he needed corralling. “Well, now, young man, what are you doing in my house?”

“Your house? But you live in the big hall with my father.”

It was no wonder he believed that. A new father, why not a new mother? “No, I live here, sweet.”

He stuck out his lower lip and scrubbed shyly at the plank floor with the toe of his scuffed shoe. “Then you’re not really going to be my mama?”

“I can’t be, Chip.” Though she wouldn’t mind that one bit. He needed a mother to love him. A father would do, but his chances there looked dismal. “However, I’ll be living here for a while. And you’re welcome anytime.”

“
Any
anytime?”

“Absolutely anytime.” Hollie scooped the boy up into her arms, because he’d fit so well and he smelled of the fog and the wood-smoked morning. “As long as you ask Mumberton if you can come. Do you promise?”

“I do.”

“Because I’ll ask you that every time you come here. ‘Chip, my good man, did you ask Mumberton if you could come to see me?’ And you’ll say honestly back to me…”

“I’ll say yes. ’Cause I will ask. I promise.” He squinched up his little face, worried to his bones by the rickety, changeable world around him. “But I didn’t tell him this time, ’cause I didn’t know I was coming here.”

“This one time, then, I’ll tell Mumberton that you helped me straighten things up.” She set him down, and he clapped his hands together.

“
Can
I help you?”

“Are you a good sheet folder?”

“The very best.” He rolled up the sheet he’d been tangled in and bunched it into her arms. “See! And I’m a good deer chaser too. I was following that big red one when I saw you come in here.”

Country-raised, wild-limbed. What had his life been made of before three days ago? Four now. Oh, what a change a day could make. “So you must have deer where you come from?”

Chip scrunched up his brow. “I come from here now, Ringum Hall. Mr. Draskel, the ’torney, says I do.”

Dear God, she hoped so. Prayed that Everingham wouldn’t dispute the obvious, that Chip was his flesh and blood. There was no mistaking the fierceness of his little frown or the dark whorl at his hairline that raised his curls and sent them tumbling off in a natural part.

And if she had any doubt at all, Everingham himself erased it completely when he appeared in the doorway in the next breath. Father and son both frowning at her.

The man was dressed like a country squire, in rough trousers, a linsey-woolsey shirt, and a knobby wool jacket with sagging pockets.

Far more handsome now than he’d been in his linen and silk and far more dangerous.

Charles had expected the gatehouse to be empty and echoing, had thought to inspect it before he sent a cleaning crew to ready it for his reluctant new tenant, who ought to have still been beneath her counterpane, sleeping off the night’s adventures.

But here she was in the gatehouse, dressed in a godawful long coat that looked damned familiar, wearing an over-big pair of muddied Welling
tons, her hair swept up into a loose tangle atop her head and fastened there with a stick of some sort, save for the wild curls that fringed her collar and made a halo around her face.

And the boy. Crowded up against her, caught inside the cocoon of the coat, his back pressed to her legs—clinging to her in terror or defending her from the ogre in the doorway, he wasn’t certain.

He felt large and out of place, extraneous.

“Welcome, my lord,” the woman said finally, tousling the boy’s hair and picking up the wadded sheet that had fallen to the floor. “We weren’t expecting visitors, were we, Chip?”

“Nope. Not that one.”

That one. The little hooligan. He’d never in his life felt so thoroughly dismissed and certainly never by a creature who barely reached his waist. The boy caught the loose ends of the sheet and mirrored Miss Finch in her careful folding, his square chin in the air. A damning miniature of the one he saw every morning when he shaved.

Which was the problem. He hadn’t the slightest idea how to be a father. He only knew his own had been unsuitable.

“I meant for you to remain in the house, Miss Finch, and wait for me—”

“For our meeting in the library, I know. But you were busy with your estate agent and I wanted to see the gatehouse, to settle in and be ready.”

“You needn’t do all this,” he said, moving into the room. “I’ll send the staff.”

“We can manage this much, can’t we, Chip?”

“Yup.” The boy kept at his folding, his eyes averted now, when for the last three days Charles had felt them on him like a beacon. The surprise was that he felt the loss, felt an inexplicable emptiness.

“That is, if our plan fits yours, my lord.” She was looking directly at him, her eyes more dazzlingly green than he remembered, a challenge in her stance, and the boy at the heart of it as she finished with the sheet.

This domesticity would keep her occupied, and would do the boy some measure of good—more than good, if he recalled rightly the motherly needs of a boy. “As you wish, madam.”

She smoothed her gentle fingers through the boy’s curly hair, bending down to his beaming, upturned face. “Chip, why don’t you take all the sheets off the furniture and put them in a pile right there in the corner.”

“The upstairs too?”

She smiled at him, and touched her fingertip to the end of his nose. “What an excellent idea.”

The boy leaped to his task, knocking a table askew as he yanked off its cover, basking in her attention as he dragged the sheet to the corner and dumped it.

“I trust the gatehouse will do, madam.”

Spots of rose defined her cheeks as she tucked
a stray strand of hair behind her ear and then sighed. “Actually, I swore that I wasn’t going to admit it to you, my lord, but…it’s quite lovely.”

That pleased him for an instant, had him almost wallowing in pride, until he realized that she was doubtless imagining meeting her captain here in secret: a rendezvous, a happy marital reunion. In the bed upstairs.

Which left him wanting to renege on his offer and take her back to the house, to the chamber next to his. But that would only bring on a torment of its own. He swallowed back his untoward anger and said as evenly as he could manage, “You’ll let me or Mumberton know if you need anything.”