Chapter 17 #2
A card came from Lady Edgcumbe, wife of the Baron Edgcumbe, who invited them to call when the family summered at Cotehele, their manor in Calstock, which was only a few miles away.
Swift inquiries on Inez’s part confirmed that Lady Edgcumbe, though gracious and comely, had no children but a lively boy of thirteen, and her husband was a vice-admiral rising through the ranks of naval and political service.
They would be valuable neighbors for Joseph to cultivate, and it seemed Reuben, and Favella, had done their best to be ingratiating.
“Treen.” Inez recalled him now, a gentleman with large mother-of-pearl buttons on his coats, several chains tucked into his waistcoat, and a white-powdered physician’s wig more suited to men of the professions.
Inez would not swear to it, but she suspected the man wore face powder and rouge.
When she opened the front door, he had surveyed her up and down like she was a trull showing off her wares, then gave her an openly appreciative leer.
She hated men like that—men who assumed the right to evaluate every woman for her sexual allure, and then thought it a favor to inform the woman where she fell in his ranking. “He’s the one as runs the shop in Callington?”
“Along with several other interests, some which he shared with my cousin, according to the solicitor. I’ve yet to see that any of the speculations they engaged in together yielded a real profit.
At any rate, he was keen to make an offer, and assured me he was the only interested buyer hereabouts who had the means to pay me a fair price. ”
“Would you sell?”
“Not unless I must. If I’m lucky, there will be roes and rabbits in those woods, to add occasionally to your table.” He slid her a sidewise gaze. “If, that is, you insist on continuing as my housekeeper.”
“I believe I will.” Inez soothed her mittens over her linen apron, white and crisp and ironed just that morning, along with her cap and kerchief. “It suits me to have a say in the running of things. In George Court, you know, I always had to submit to the cook. But here, Wenna defers to me.”
“And you’ve been very frugal about managing so far. Thank you.”
“It is my pleasure,” she said, glowing at his praise, and yet disconcerted by the compliment.
It was true she had taken on less staff than a house like this perhaps required.
Aside from her and Wenna, she had hired a kitchen maid, a scullery maid, a chambermaid, and a hall boy who could be put to work outside when the occasion warranted.
She could hire a footman and make Joseph impressive to his friends and neighbors, but she feared a footman would be cheeky to a housekeeper who was young and foreign-born and, he would soon learn, sleeping in the master’s bed.
Besides, a proper footman would want to report to a butler, and that was an extravagance the house could currently not support, given there was now to be an extra tax on indoor manservants.
There was already the window tax to consider, the tax on any bricks they used to repair the outer buildings, and the taxes on the sheep, the carriage, and the silver plate.
“Though in truth,” Joseph said aloud, “you could govern the household just as well were you the baronet’s lady.”
She went absolutely still. The sunshine, which had not seemed intense otherwise, not the way it could be in Portugal, now beat down on her plain straw bergère hat. Pinpricks of sweat filled her cotton gloves.
“It isn’t done.” Her voice came out a whisper, the low haunting whistle through a reed. “It isn’t. A man of your stature marrying…a woman like me.”
He watched for ruts and pocks in the lane that led along the stream, really no more than a ditch that was currently filled with water.
It made a convenient boundary, and neither of them needed to consult the map.
Her heart jumped about in her chest as if were a treehopper, one of the strange brown bugs Joseph had pointed out to her.
“A woman like you,” he said slowly, turning the phrase over in his mouth. “Strong-willed, you mean. Beautiful. Clever, determined, passionate. A survivor. A woman who will not suffer a wrong to be done in her sight.”
“I fear it.” The words gusted from her. “I fear what your neighbors would say. Lady Edgcumbe, the mistress of Cotehele— She is the daughter of the Archbishop of York, remember. She may not at all approve of a baronet marrying his housekeeper.”
And the rest of the neighborhood would follow the lead of their great ones; their tastes and opinions were the law of the land.
“You are not my housekeeper.”
“But I am.”
“You are…” He sputtered, pulling the reins as the gelding tossed his big head and tried to nip overhanging greenery from a passing tree.
She waited. What was she to him? Did he even know?
“You could be my lady,” he settled for saying.
She studied him while she had him here, close at her side and with no other person to lay claim to his time and attention.
She surveyed him as thoroughly and as greedily as Mr. Treen, not a gentleman, had surveyed her.
Joseph was so much to look at, and every piece of him pierced her heart in so many ways, that sometimes she did not simply sit back to take in the whole of him.
The way his limbs came together in that kind of powerful grace that made her think of a wild, territorial animal, a deer or a bear or a ram.
Some men affected ennui or disinterest, but never Joseph.
That light of intelligence, of keen interest in the world around him, animated his eyes from the moment he opened them in the morning, his mind already working over some thought that had come to him in his sleep.
He could not be diffident if he tried; he felt everything deeply.
He was loyal and passionate and God above, so stubborn, and she wanted nothing more than to walk beside him her whole life and brush the wet from his collar because he would have forgotten his umbrella and be too preoccupied with his thoughts to care about stepping out of the rain.
But baronets did not marry the daughters of lascars and whores.
“I cannot,” she said.
Whatever reply he might have made to that was lost in an enormous cracking sound. Then the horse bolted.
Inez fell out of the cart at once. She was no seasoned horsewoman or farm girl; she’d known to cling to the top of the stagecoach, but the sudden leap forward left her unprepared, and she simply toppled sideways off the bench.
She hit the ground before she could draw breath to scream, and to her good fortune, she was thrown free of the wheel, which churned a clod of dirt that spattered her apron.
The next events happened more quickly than she could quite comprehend.
Joseph shouted something, to her or the horse, she didn’t know.
The horse whinnied and fought as Joseph pulled back on the ribbons.
Another sharp cracking sound, like a great falling branch; Joseph swore; and then he was tumbling off the side of the cart as well, and Inez cried out and did not catch her breath again until she saw him roll to his feet, unscathed, and start toward her.
“Inez. Are you hurt?”
She shook her head, not yet able to form words. Her chest was an empty cave. Her head felt like she’d stuck it inside a ringing bell. Before she could protest Joseph was on his knees beside her in the mud, his hands moving over every part of her.
“Wh-what happened?” Her teeth were chattering. Astonishing. She had never been afraid for her life before; it felt a bit like the ague, leaving her shaking and feverish and weak.
“Gunshot.” His mouth was a grim slash. “Someone is shooting on my land, or close to my land. Spooked the horse.”
“Sp-spooked me,” Inez said, her teeth still chattering.
Joseph kissed her forehead, then her temple, as if relieved to find her unhurt. “Swivel gun,” he said under his breath. “The first shot was the big barrel, which is meant for larger game. The second was the bird shot.”
Joseph was a scholar. Aside from playing bowls now and again, he didn’t engage in sporting activities, not even drinking to excess. How did he know about the firing of guns?
“M-missed his shot, I s-spose.”
“Kept me from gaining control of the horse,” he growled. “I hope Arthur has the sense to head back to the stables, where Thaker will guess we’ve gone astray.”
“Arthur.” Her mind, still whirling in great loops, clutched on the small thing it could encompass and be sure of. “The horse’s name is Arthur.”
He grinned at her, but there was something feral in it.
His hat had come off when he leapt out of the cart and lay some distance away down the lane.
The birds that had scattered at the shot and the bellow of the horse slowly regathered in the treetops of willow and downy birch that lined the banks of the stream.
She sat in a bed of soft grasses, the flowers of the bird cherry blooming above her.
It was an enchanted bower, and if she were not recovering from a fright that had made her heart do somersaults and a fall that jarred her teeth, she would make something of it, being spilled into this woodland glade with her love.
“You could have been hurt,” he muttered, pressing kisses to her cheeks, her temple, her chin. “You could have been hurt.”
Inez snaked her arms about his neck and pulled his mouth to meet hers.
There was a wildness in his kiss that she answered immediately. The tender welcome and soft forays with which he met her in the evenings, when they stood in his chamber in a penumbra of candlelight, were gone. This was need, fierce and clawing. Want roared up within her like a bear at the baiting.