Chapter 19 #2
“Inez—Mrs. Da Costa has left? To Plymouth? She doesn’t have people there.”
Inez was gone. She had left him. Joseph felt the same thrill of terror jolt through his body as when the gunshot spooked the horse and Inez had fallen off the cart.
He had no life without her in it. She could not leave him. He must do whatever he could to keep her, worthy or not.
He wheeled and headed for the house. He needed to confirm the boy’s divulgence. He needed to see what she had taken, to know how long she planned to stay away.
“What’s a rider doing on my land anyway?” Joseph asked as the others turned to walk with him. “Hunting for leverets?” The baby hares were a delicacy, he would admit.
“Fossicking, most like,” Wenna mused. At Joseph’s puzzled look, she translated. “Prospecting, I think they say upcountry.”
Joseph slowed and signed to Thaker. “I haven’t looked on the other side of the stream. I thought it was just rocks.”
’Tis, Thaker signed back. But he might’ve left something.
Something that might identify the interloper. Joseph agreed. While he was desperate to know where Inez went, he had a responsibility to the people who lived on his property to ensure they would not be attacked while simply doing their job.
These acres on the southeast corner had been a delight to play in when he was a lad, the granite bones of the earth showing through.
To his boyhood imagination the rocky outcroppings, with their colorful striations and clusters of embedded minerals, had served as the deserts of Arabia, the Mongolian steppes, and the high peaks of the Alps.
Now there was a great crater blasted into the ground, creating a cliff that young Joseph would have turned into the Scottish peak of Ben Nevis and undertaken to scale.
It would have taken considerable force to break apart the granite shelves, and Joseph’s hunch was confirmed when he pressed a finger to a smudge of black dust and then sniffed. Gunpowder.
“What were they looking for?” he wondered aloud.
“Lodes of ore,” Wenna answered, signing for her husband. “Thas as how they make the pits deeper when all of the surface veins have been mined.”
“Veins of what?” Joseph picked up a nearby fragment, what looked like a packed piece of earth.
The surface was mottled with gray and red-brown spots, like a vellum page in one of Amaranthe’s old manuscripts that had been left to mold and rot for a hundred years.
It was a thin shard, but much heavier than parchment, and the sheared border held an edge that pressed against his palm.
He looked up, a suspicion solidifying, just as Thaker signed back. Copper, the other man said.
An unfamiliar horse was being walked in the front drive before the house when they returned, Joseph carrying a sack of the rock fragments with their veins of reddish-brown and green.
Clouds hunched low in the sky, boding rain, and the low light reminded Joseph that Inez was gone.
He must find where she went and follow her.
Wenna’d had no notice she meant to depart, and if it were an errand for the house, she would have spoken to Wenna if not to him.
“Tell me,” he said to the stable boy, who started forward to talk to the lad holding the other horse, “does that look to you like one of the horses they keep at the White Hart in town?”
“It do, sir.”
“And bearing a remarkable resemblance to the mount Dashel flushed. The trespasser’s.”
“It might, at that, sir,” said the boy.
Joseph was only partly inclined to be civil when he saw the visitor was Treen, and that Treen was not in the formal parlor but inspecting the morning room, which had yet to be cleared of its extra trunks and furniture to make the study Joseph was planning.
“Sir Joseph. Thank you for receiving me.” Treen tugged off his glove and advanced with his hand out.
Joseph didn’t see how he could disoblige by not shaking the man’s hand, but Treen’s palm was limp and damp.
He eyed Joseph’s glove, marked with green dust, and then the rest of his attire, his plain coat and leather breeches.
Clearly the neighborhood expected the new baronet to make a better account of himself than showing up in his dirt in his drawing room.
Well, until Joseph found a way to make something of his land, he would be out upon it, and the neighborhood would simply have to acknowledge that the new baronet was not the fop his predecessor had been.
“Mr. Treen. I would have make myself better available had I known you intended to call.” Joseph’s tone held a hint of frost. He didn’t wish to alienate the man, someone his own age and near his own standing, but Treen’s ability to mushroom everywhere was becoming damned inconvenient.
“I was in the area, so thought I’d look in. Talk a bit more about continuing the agreement I had with your cousin.”
“Ah. The agreement.” Joseph tugged off his other glove and slapped them together. Treen was becoming overbearing about pressing this alliance. He insisted he’d been in a business partnership with Reuben, though the solicitor could find no record of any agreement.
“I know, as a gentleman, you’ll honor another gentleman’s word,” Treen said with an oily smile.
But Treen was not a gentleman, Joseph wanted to point out.
His father had been a publican who had failed at public houses in Saltash, Liskeard, and Pensilva before finally making a go of the Half Moon in Stoke Climsland.
Treen’s mother had been a barmaid and gave herself more airs than Favella ever had.
From what Joseph could tell, Treen’s record as a businessman was at least as fraught as his father’s; the millinery shop was the second if not the third venture he had undertaken in Callington.
“Remind me again what the agreement was,” Joseph said. “Mr. Hoskyn has so far been able to produce no trace of it.”
“We had not proceeded to the step of putting things in writing, I grant you. Your cousin was a man of honor, as am I. And I was offering to help him, as he knew. Buying a few acres of the more worthless property, the ones he couldn’t farm.
With the attendant rights, of course. Water, and so on.
” Treen grimaced. “We would have had all things signed and tidied if he hadn’t taken ill, poor devil. ”
“Ah.” Joseph looked around the room. He would be some time cleaning up Reuben’s messes. “I would offer you refreshment, but I understand my housekeeper has been unexpectedly called away.”
“The lovely Mrs. Da Costa,” Treen said. “We should all be so fortunate to have a housekeeper so comely.”
Joseph gave him a severe look. “She is a woman in my employ and therefore under my protection.”
Treen wore a small, satisfied smile, as if he’d discovered something, or had a suspicion confirmed. Then he adopted a moue of concern.
“I suppose I should warn you, then. Mrs. Da Costa came to my shop just yesterday. I did her the honor of introducing her to my mother, as I supposed would be the kind thing to do— A woman of her, shall we say, complexion may not be welcomed by the better people of Callington without our example. I am gratified to say that my mother and I have always been very open-minded. We take seriously the biblical injunction to love all of God’s creatures. ”
“There is not a single reason Inez should not be perfectly presentable to your mother,” Joseph said icily, aware he lied.
Mrs. Treen would be unlikely to welcome the daughter of a lascar into her drawing room, and certainly not, given her own social aspirations and affectations, the daughter of a trull.
A woman who had set foot in Dark Lane would not be accepted into the parlors of those aspiring to gentility.
It was only someone very innocent or very eccentric or very tender-hearted, and Amaranthe was all of these things, who would overlook a person’s past and see an opportunity to provide assistance.
Now that she was the Duchess of Hunsdon, Amaranthe could be as eccentric as she wished, and be admired for it, if not imitated. A Mrs. Treen of Callington could not afford to be eccentric, at least, not if she wished to rise.
What was Treen playing at, introducing Inez into his mother’s circle? Attempting to show her that Treen, as her protector, could offer her a parent and a lively social circle, which Joseph could not?
Treen’s smile shifted to one side. “I ought to tell you, man to man. Mrs. Da Costa made certain…advances to me. Indications, if you take my meaning. Of course, I wouldn’t take advantage of a woman in her circumstances.”
Joseph’s head went up and back as if he were a bridled horse and Treen had yanked on the ribbons. “What circumstances do you believe she is in?”
“Did I say circumstances?” Treen raised his brow.
“I meant rather…profession.” He withdrew a snuffbox from his coat and opened it.
“My friends will tease me that I am too nice, but I confess I am not tempted by common women. One simply never knows what they might bring with them. And such a woman will never be moved by affection.”
Treen took a pinch of snuff, deposited on the back of his hand, conveyed his knuckles to his nose, and sniffed deeply. Immediately his eyes began to water, and he held the box out to Joseph.
Joseph shook his head. His father had smoked pipe tobacco, but had never taken snuff, nor had his mother. Amaranthe said Reuben and Favella had taken so much when she lived with them that she could no longer bear the scent.
“Inez,” he said instead, “made overtures to you.” He’d never heard his own tone sound so deadly.
Treen, preoccupied with closing his snuffbox and returning the enameled case to his pocket, then withdrew his handkerchief, a heavily embroidered silk affair.
“It seems she is on the hunt for a new protector, my friend. The reason for her current absence, one might suppose?”
“You’ll forgive me if I have another appointment,” Joseph said. “It is pressing.” He was betraying himself, and he did not care if he showed Treen that his barbs had landed. Keeping up appearances with this one would be a daunting and never-ending task.
“I beg your pardon if I have upset you. I shall take my leave.” Treen gathered his gloves and walking stick. He carried his chapeau bras beneath his arm, the better, Joseph supposed, to show off his freshly curled and powdered wig.
“Those lands,” Treen said again. “We can discuss them at another time? I’m willing to pay a fair price. I want to see our new baronet well-established in the neighborhood, and I have leave to know, sadly, the straits in which the former baronet left you.”
The thought of this man knowing the state of his finances was nearly as enraging as his suggestion—false, of course—that Inez had thrown herself at his head. Inez didn’t like the man and made fun of his cologne.
“Do be careful as you are riding about,” Joseph said as he showed his guest to the door. “I heard someone shooting on my property the other day. Someone I hadn’t given leave to hunt here.”
“Shooting?” Treen’s dark eyebrows were incongruent against his pale wig. “How dreadful. I do hope ruffians are not making free on your acres.”
“Nor the acres you’re hoping to buy,” Joseph said. “Rest easy, I will identify and deal with the interfering ape. I don’t think enough people know it, but Reuben bred his dogs to be quite vicious.”
“Did he.” Joseph couldn’t be certain, as Treen wore powder, but his face seemed to blanch momentarily. “I will be certain to warn my friends.”
“Oh, don’t,” Joseph said with false pleasantry. He pulled open the front portal as Treen gripped his walking stick. “I’d quite like to see the hounds tear any trespassers apart.”
“And I thought Londoners would be civilized,” Treen remarked, stepping across the threshold into the cloudy day, which had somehow grown darker.
“Not when we’re crossed,” Joseph answered. “Have a care where you step, Treen, and rest easy—Inez won’t trouble you again.”
“A beautiful woman is always trouble,” Treen said with another of his oily smiles, and then, at long last, he turned to his horse.
Joseph had no time to congratulate himself that his suspicions were true. Treen was the one he’d seen riding earlier, but was he also the one who had shot at him? If so, he had put Inez in danger, and for no other reason than that he was bloody interested in a certain pocket of Penwellen land.
Wenna appeared in the doorway, and, as if she shared the thought that suddenly struck Joseph, she carried his outer coat, hat, and riding gloves.
She also carried one more item that made Joseph’s eyes widen to see it. It went against all the training he’d received to be conciliatory, but when had minding his manners ever gained him what he wanted?
“Plymouth,” Wenna confirmed. “That Jock took ’er, and Arthur in the cart. She never said why, or who she was going to see, but me lover says they had a natter a day agone at the pub, and Mrs. Da Costa seemed proper wisht by the end of un.”
“Wisht?” Joseph echoed, taking his items from her.
“Pale. Sad.”
There was only one reason he could think of that Inez would drop all and take off for a port town with nary a word to the rest of them. Something had happened to her father.
“Treen, I know you’ll forgive me, but I need your horse.
It’s a hack from the White Hart, isn’t it?
” Joseph pulled on his riding gloves as he strode toward the mount, a Hackney with strong lines and a deep chest. He needn’t waste the time strapping spurs to his boots; this horse could go fifteen miles at a brisk trot.
“It is, but you can’t mean— You can’t take my horse!” Treen spluttered.
Joseph made a few quick adjustments and swung himself into the saddle. He dug a coin from his pocket and flipped it to the other man, exactly as if he were a servant.
“I just did. One of my trotters can see you home, and my boy will stop in the White Hart to tell them of the trade. Fearful accommodating of you, old man, but then I believe you owe me a boon. If you’re to make free hacking about on my land, then I’m at liberty to borrow your horse.”
He saw from the man’s dark expression that he had made a firm enemy, but he couldn’t spare a moment to care.
Inez was going to Plymouth, so he was, too.
She might be accosted on the road by ruffians; she might meet all manner of menace at the docks.
She might even now be taking in news that would pull her world down about her ears.
He had to be there for her if that happened. And somehow—and he had no notion how he might do so—he needed to persuade her to come back to him, and stay.