Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
“You have barely touched that drink.” Benedict set his elbows on the scarred, beer-slicked wood of the tavern table.
He looked at Malcolm.
The tavern was low-ceilinged and thick with the haze of tallow smoke and the yeasty tang of spilled ale. It was a warm, noisy sanctuary, filled with men who had come somewhere other than home to sit.
A fire roared at the far wall, spitting sparks against the soot-stained hearth.
The noise, a cacophony of clinking glass and raucous laughter, was substantial enough to swallow a private conversation whole.
This was precisely why Benedict had chosen this village over the one adjacent to his own estate.
Malcolm picked up the glass. The amber liquid burned his throat, but he welcomed the heat. “I have touched it now.”
“The boy on the hunt,” Benedict guessed, “and his mother.”
“No.”
“No, what?”
“No? we are not discussing it.”
Benedict leaned forward, his shadow dancing long and jagged against the wall behind him.
“You came here in the mood you are in, sat down with that face, and haven’t said a useful word in forty minutes. We are discussing something tonight. It might as well be the thing that’s actually on your mind.”
Malcolm looked toward the far wall. Two men were deep in a card argument, their voices rising and settling in a comfortable, rhythmic growl.
“She came to my estate,” he said finally, the words forced out through a tight jaw. “This morning—to tell me to stay away from the boy.”
Benedict said nothing, but his eyebrows moved up and stayed there, arched in silent commentary.
“We argued.”
“And?”
A long, heavy pause stretched between them, filled only by the crackle of the fire.
“Ah,” Benedict said softly.
He had the decency not to smile, but his eyes danced with a sudden, sharp clarity. He lifted his glass, finished it in one long pull, and set it down. “Well,” he said. “That’s something.”
“It’s nothing.”
“Brigrock.”
“It was a mistake.”
Benedict nodded slowly, the gesture of a man who had noted a statement without believing a word of it. He signaled to the barkeep for another round.
They drank in silence for a time as the tavern settled into its later, looser hour. The fire dropped to a glowing bed of embers.
Malcolm turned his glass in a slow circle, watching the light catch the liquid. He kept his eyes on the table, fighting the memory of the exact expression on Penelope’s face in the half-second before she had pulled back. The way her lips had looked, swollen and parted in surprise.
Just then, two women arrived at their table. They stepped out of the shadows at the edge of the lamplight, reading the table and the men sitting at it in a single, expert glance. One was dark-haired and sharp-eyed; the other was fair. Both were young. Both were looking for a way to pass the night.
“Good evening.” The dark-haired one settled a hand on the back of Benedict’s chair, her fingers trailing lightly over the wood. “You look like men with stories worth hearing.”
Benedict looked up, and the grin that broke across his face was genuine and effortless. “Sit down and find out.”
The fair one took the chair beside Malcolm. She was pretty in a direct, uncomplicated way, her smile open and without the baggage of expectations.
“Navy men?” the dark-haired one asked, her voice a low purr.
“What gave us away?” Benedict asked.
“The way you hold yourselves. Men who’ve served carry the sea in their shoulders. Even sitting still.” She tilted her head, her gaze lingering on Benedict’s weathered face. “How long?”
“Three years in the Channel squadron.” Benedict leaned in, already settling into the best part of his evening. “Atlantic Coast to the Mediterranean. Action enough to last a lifetime.”
“You’ve earned something for that,” she whispered.
“That,” Benedict said, casting a brief, unapologetic glance at Malcolm, “is very nearly exactly what I was thinking. Don’t wait up.”
He stood, pushed back his chair with a cheerful scrape of wood on stone, and walked toward the back of the tavern. The dark-haired woman went with him, her hip brushing his as they moved.
The fair one watched them go, then turned her full attention back to Malcolm. She rested her arm along the table near his, her skin pale against the dark, scarred wood. She was close enough that he could smell the faint scent of lavender water and the simple, human warmth of her.
“And you?” she said. “You’ve been quiet all evening.”
“I’m usually quiet,” Malcolm answered plainly.
“Doesn’t mean there’s nothing going on inside.” She shifted closer, her shoulder almost touching his.
Her offer was straightforward. A clean transaction with no history attached, nothing he would have to carry out the door or account for in the morning.
He knew exactly what this was. He looked at her, at the softness of her mouth and the uncomplicated invitation in her eyes.
And then the memory of the garden arrived, uninvited and overwhelming.
The phantom weight of Lady Romwich’s hand against his chest, the heat of her heartbeat under his palm.
The image of her standing at the lake’s edge, her spine a rigid line of ice that he had seen melt into fire.
The way she had tasted, of cold air and desperate, hidden longing.
He wanted that. He wanted the specific, agonizing difficulty of her. He wanted the argument and the defiance and the way she looked at him as if he were a storm she couldn’t decide whether to flee or embrace.
Not this. Never this.
He reached into his coat, his movements sharp. He laid enough coin on the table to be more than decent and stood up.
“I appreciate the company,” he said, his voice raspy and final. “Good night.”
She looked at the coin, then up at him. There was no resentment in her gaze, only a professional understanding.
She nodded once.
He stepped outside, and the cold air hit him straight in the face. It was sharp and clean, smelling of damp earth and the promise of rain. He stood by his horse for a long moment, one hand resting on the animal’s powerful neck, looking at the dark silhouettes of the trees against the sky.
He had kissed a woman who hated him and then paid a perfectly agreeable woman to leave him alone.
The facts of his evening were not flattering, and the hollow ache in his chest was becoming a permanent fixture.
He mounted and rode home into the dark, the rhythm of the horse’s hooves echoing the name he wasn’t supposed to be thinking.
Penelope Romwich.
Two days later, Penelope’s studio smelled of linseed oil, turpentine, and the dry, papery warmth of canvases stacked like silent witnesses along the walls.
The morning light, filtered through the high, north-facing windows, was cool and clinical. She had been at her easel since nine.
The orchard painting she had meant to finish, a study of dappled light and soft fruit, was turned toward the wall, abandoned.
The canvas currently on the easel held a small, still lake.
It was a study in brooding grays and dark greens, with flat light skimming a surface that looked like cold glass.
Reeds huddled along one edge, and a low stone wall sat in the middle distance, half-hidden by overgrown shadows.
She stared at it until the shapes began to blur.
With a sharp, frustrated motion, she set her brush down on the palette. She pressed two fingers against the bridge of her nose, the scent of oil paint clinging to her skin.
She was not thinking about him. She was certainly not thinking about the way the lake water had looked beaded on his skin, or the specific, devastating heat of his mouth.
She picked the brush back up, looked at the canvas, at the wall she had painted with too much memory in her strokes, and set it down again.
The door banged open with Nicholas’s particular brand of enthusiasm, the kind that stopped just short of taking the hinges off.
“Can we go for a ride?” He was still wrestling his arm through his jacket sleeve, his face flushed. “Mr. Calloway finished the lesson early. I have been sitting since breakfast, Mama. I might actually turn into a chair if I stay still any longer.”
“Yes.” Penelope was already reaching for the rag to scrub the pigment from her hands. The room felt suddenly too small, too quiet. “A ride is a very good idea. Yes.”
Nicholas didn’t move toward the door.
Instead, he began to drift through the room, hands shoved deep into his pockets, examining the studio with an unhurried, terrifyingly sharp attention. He moved toward the north wall where the newer canvases were leaning. He tilted his head, his brow furrowing.
“You have been painting a lot of lakes,” he said.
Penelope folded the cleaning cloth with precise, trembling fingers. “Have I?”
“That is a lake, Mama.” He pointed at the easel. “And that sketch by the window is a lake. And those two at the back.”
He turned and looked at her with a calm, matter-of-fact expression. “You used to paint the orchard. You said the light was better there.”
“I paint all sorts of things, Nicholas. Landscapes change with the season.”
He looked at the several sketches pinned above her worktable. Each one was a variation of the same theme: water, reeds, and a solitary stone wall. He looked at his mother, his gaze lingering a second too long.
She moved toward the door, her skirts swishing with forced energy. “Put your riding coat on properly. Your collar is tucked in.”
He went, his boots thumping a rhythm on the stairs.
Penelope stood in the doorway of the studio for one long, still moment, looking back at the dark water on her easel. It looked less like a painting and more like a confession.
She pulled the door shut and locked it.
The south lane began at the far end of their grounds, the one that ran like a scar along the boundary between Romwich Hall and Brigrock.
Previously, it had been just a line on a map to her.
Now, as she stood in the stable yard while the groom brought their horses round, it felt like a magnetic pole, pulling at her thoughts.