Chapter 1
The drizzle started up again just as Sir Westcott Twisden stepped out of the farrier’s barn.
Pulling the curled brim of his hat lower, he looked around. The high street was bustling just as if Normanton had been a market town. It was a homely and pleasant place, much like Stakeley, the town near Twisden Manor, his estate in the far northern county of Westmoreland.
The locals here exchanged pleasant greetings and sent him nods and inquisitive smiles even though he was, in the jargon of Sussex, a foreigner, one who’d strayed beyond the usual bounds of nearby Brighton.
He nodded back and continued on to the local inn, the Duck and Spoon, where his friend and host, Captain Reginald Dalrymple, a bandy-legged, brown-haired captain on half-pay, awaited him.
“Oof.” Almost six feet of giggling youth slammed into him, knocking his hat into a muddy rut.
As he grabbed the fellow’s collar, another fellow slammed into the first one, and Wes grabbed that one as well.
He yanked them around, and their mouths dropped open. His own too, probably.
They were twins, dark haired, hazel-eyed, and identical… or not quite. One was broader, his face fuller, with a scar on his chin that the slighter, more freckled one was lacking.
“I say.” Wes gave them a little shake and watched both sets of eyes start to twinkle. “What horseplay is this? That beaver came from Lock’s of St. James’s Street. Bought it last month. Didn’t at all plan on christening it in a mud puddle.”
They exchanged a glance and both squashed smiles.
“Sorry, sir,” the bigger lad said in the scratchy voice of burgeoning youth.
“Deepest apologies,” said the other one. “I’ll fetch your hat, shall I?”
Wes released him, and he limped over, retrieving the hat and handing it to the other rapscallion, who used the tails of his neckcloth to wipe off the worst of the mud.
A wagon stopped directly in front of them, and the woman holding the reins looked over. “Cass, Paul, what are you doing with your neckcloth?”
Her gaze met his, and his pulse quickened. Curly dark hair peeked out the sides of her chip bonnet, but her eyes were as blue as bluebells.
Was she their mother? If so, she’d been a child bride.
Her redingote was a worn lavender worsted, but from what he could discern, it was quality. She might not be a lady of the ton, such as he’d met in London over the summer, but she was at least gentry. A gentleman’s widow down on her luck?
And she was very pretty.
Conscious that he’d been staring too long, he took the hat from the boy. It wasn’t entirely ruined.
“A minor mishap,” he said. “Sir Westcott Twisden at your service, madam. I’d tip my hat to you if it wasn’t, er, damp.”
She shot the boys a frown before returning a dignified gaze back to Wes.
“I do beg your pardon, Sir… Sir Westcott. The boys did this? I’m so very sorry. If there is a… a cost… for the cleaning, I—”
“No, no, madam. If there’s to be a reckoning it will be with… Cass was it? And Paul? May I know your last name, gentlemen?”
“It’s Picard,” the slighter boy said.
“Picard.” He nudged them to the plain, serviceable wagon and its cargo of crates and sacks.
The boys clambered into the back with all the gawky lankiness of boys much younger than they appeared. Which they probably were, though they had more height than most grown men he knew. “The Picards of Normanton?” he asked.
“The Picards of Devil’s Dyke Grange,” the one called Paul said.
Ah. They were farmers. “Good day to you, Masters Picard, Mrs. Picard.”
She murmured a farewell, color rising to paint her cheeks a rosy pink, while the two in the back broke into broad grins, and, as they drove away, laughter.
The back of the lady holding the reins seemed to grow impossibly straighter.
The joke was apparently on him, and he hoped it wouldn’t hamper his chances, if she was in fact unmarried. His host, Reggie, was the son and brother of a local squire. He’d grown up in these parts and would know the answer to that question.
* * *
“How could you?”
Miss Sybil Dunsford glanced back at her stepbrothers. Their mother had christened them Castor and Pollux, out of some notion that classical names would give them a leg up at Eton and Oxford.
Unfortunately, soon after their birth, the boys’ father had gone down with the ship and the cargo that would have given them, and their older brother Langston, the means for a first-class education.
Left with a boy of nine and infant twins, the late Mrs. Picard married her husband’s widowed distant cousin, Sybil’s father.
Richard Dunsford had once been a Picard, but he adopted Sybil’s mother’s surname as the price for his first bride’s sizeable inheritance—the farm and the capital to maintain it. Under his stewardship, both had dwindled.
A short year after that second marriage, the twins’ mother died. Langston was sent off to school, and the twins were put in the care of twelve-year old Sybil until they were old enough to go away also.
Then just as the disastrous year without summer got underway, Sybil’s father died, leaving the struggling Devil’s Dyke Grange to her.
After a close look at the accounts, she’d brought the twins home for good.
Lang had left school a couple of years earlier.
He helped with the farm and ran with the local smugglers on the nights with no moon.
That had lasted until a few months ago, when the new riding officer hired him.
She’d been holding her breath, praying he wouldn’t be found working both sides of the law.
“Fegs, Sybie,” Cass said. “’Twere accidental. That foreigner weren’t mad at us.”
Paul giggled. “Seems like he got a look at you, Sybs, and didn’t mind at all.”
A shiver went through her. She was used to the ogling; her great height drew men’s attention, but so did her ownership of the farm which, as long as she could manage the mortgage, was wholly hers now.
None of the usual oglers were as tall or as handsome or as gentlemanly as Sir Westcott Twisden.
Was he taller than her? Would he be attending the local assembly in a few days?
She shook off the thought.
“Speak proper English, Cass,” she said. “You know how. Say, ‘Heavens! The gentleman wasn’t angry.’ And neither of you are yokels. You know he’s no foreigner, but a proper Englishman.”
“Sir Westcott Twisden,” Cass pronounced in a sonorous voice, and snickered.
She sighed. “How fared your lesson at the vicarage today?”
For a small fee, the curate was tutoring the twins in Latin and Greek. Cass was indifferent, but Paul had dreams of studying law.
“We’re reading Plato,” Paul said.
“Boring stuff.” Cass clambered over the seat back to join her. “Paul’s the scholarly one. Me, I will go off to sea. I’ll find a way.”
She would happily send him off to sea, if she could find a suitable place for him. With the war ending, there were few openings for midshipmen. Robin Somerville was home from the navy and might be able to help. She’d been searching out relatives of the boys’ merchant father, so far to no avail.
As for the bookish Paul, who limped from a leg break at school years earlier, her fervent hope was to apprentice him to a solicitor or some other man of business who could appreciate his intellect.
“Best you behave, Cass,” she said, “or you’ll be having a sea voyage to Botany Bay.”
* * *
A few days later
“Stacking up to be a bore, Reggie.” Wes braced one hand on the terrace balustrade and surveyed the partygoers inside through the open French doors.
He might as well be attending one of the local assemblies at home. “Not a single interesting lady.”
“Hah. Interesting and lady don’t fit together. That sort don’t get invited by this sort.”
Reggie wasn’t long out of the army where ladies of any sort had, apparently, been scarce on the ground.
They’d met in the summer, when Wes had accompanied his grandmother, the dowager Lady Twisden, a bosom friend of Reggie’s mother, to London.
“You promised me a highwayman and a ghost on this seaside sojourn,” Wes said, “and all I’ve seen are dark lanes where folks have been robbed by Captain Moonlight and the ghost has been spotted. What’s that ghostie’s name? Eddie Rose?”
Reggie favored Wes with a smirk.
In fact, Reggie had been a fine host, opening his home—actually his brother’s home near Normanton, a few miles from Brighton, for an open-ended invitation that extended to Wes’s stepmother and stepfather when they arrived home from their travels on the Continent.
“Serve you right if Captain Moonlight slips your purse one night when out and about.” Reggie chuckled. “That’s what the Major would say.”
The Major was Major Augustus Kellborn, Reggie’s former commanding officer and Wes’s…
well, Gus was more than Wes’s distant cousin now.
He’d married Honoria Twisden, Wes’s stepmother, in the spring.
In his letter, Gus said they were offered passage on a friend’s yacht and would arrive at Shoreham in the autumn.
They might decide to stay near Brighton for a few months.
Gus’s letter had included shocking news about the dear, diminutive lady who’d raised Wes since the age of seven, news that set Wes’s perception of her on its head.
Or, given the shock he’d had when she and Gus announced their betrothal, on its head again.
Stepmama was with child.
Wes chuckled at his own… naivety. He would miss her presence at Twisden Manor, but was glad for Gus, who’d taken Wes under his wing, at times none too gently, in ways Wes’s father never had.
From his father, his father’s hunting friends, and the fellows at school, he’d heard the more salacious lessons of manhood.
Gus’s lessons had been more about the practicalities of navigating the temptations open to a young man of good fortune.
The sort of lessons Gus had knocked into the men serving under him, like Reggie.
“There’s Somerville and his wife,” Reggie said. “Capital fellow. He’s planning a grand house party.”