Chapter Nineteen
Every morning at the hunting lodge began the same way.
Isaac and Tom rode out shortly after breakfast to meet with tenants, inspect whatever damaged fence or collapsed roof the previous day's survey had uncovered, and organise the growing list of repairs the estate required before winter set in properly.
While the men embarked on "men's work," Helena and Mary remained behind to tackle the considerable work of restoring a house left largely to itself for years.
They spent their days sweeping years of dust from shuttered rooms, taking careful inventory of what few supplies the lodge still held, and preparing meals sufficient to feed the small army of workmen Isaac's repairs had begun to draw from the surrounding villages.
Helena welcomed the arrangement more than she cared to admit.
With Isaac preoccupied on other matters, she did not have to worry about avoiding him all day.
And whenever their paths did cross, she made certain to be occupied elsewhere. Perhaps volunteering for whatever extra task Mary hadn't claimed yet or fetching more water from the well.
Helena was also sure to keep Mary close at all times, as though proximity to her friend alone might shield her from whatever unsettled thing rose in her chest each time Isaac's eyes found hers.
She told herself, with a firmness she wished came more easily, that what had happened between them in the library was a mistake.
A mistake that must never under any circumstance be repeated.
It was a lapse in judgment brought on by too much wine and too charged an evening, nothing more significant than that.
However, the careful distance she maintained did nothing whatsoever to lessen her awareness of him. If anything, the avoidance only sharpened it.
Unfortunately, the days of separate work were short-lived.
That morning, Tom presented the steward's list of needed supplies. Between the nails, timber tools, and lamp oil, there was also a considerable quantity of household provisions that the lodge's neglected larder could no longer adequately provide.
And so, all four of them were required to travel together into the nearby market town.
***
The morning's errands took them through a good half-dozen shops and stalls, the steward's list divided sensibly enough between them.
Tom and Isaac were to see to the nails, timber, and tools at the ironmonger's while Mary and Helena were sent ahead to the grocer's for lamp oil and whatever provisions the lodge's larder still lacked.
Their business concluded rather more quickly than expected and they reconvened in the Main Street. After they had finished packing their purchases into the carriage, Tom suddenly turned, his face bright.
"Look there."
He pointed toward a scattering of brightly coloured posters nailed outside of the town's taverns.
GRAND EXHIBITION OF THE MANLY ART
TO BE HELD THIS EVENING
A CONTEST OF SKILL & STRENGTH
between
"BULLDOG" HARRIS
Champion of these Parts
and
A WORTHY CHALLENGER, TO BE NAMED AT THE HOUR
RINGSIDE AT EIGHT O'CLOCK
Gentlemen and Admirers of the Sport are invited to attend.
Wagers taken within. Ale and Victuals provided throughout the Evening.
No Person of Disorderly Conduct will be Suffered to Remain.
"God, I haven't watched a proper match as a spectator in years,” Tom said. “Always fighting myself, or seconding for Isaac, never once simply enjoying one from the crowd. We ought to stay."
"We've work waiting at the lodge, Tom."
Isaac's refusal came quickly, though Helena noted a flicker of something in his expression that suggested the idea held more appeal for him than he was willing to admit outright.
"One evening won't undo a week's worth of repairs," Tom said.
He was not easily deterred, warming further to the argument with every word.
"Even barons deserve an evening's entertainment now and again, whatever ideas of duty you've talked yourself into since Harrow walked into that tavern with his papers.
Come, Isaac—for old times' sake, if nothing else. "
Isaac hesitated, and Tom, sensing the crack in his resolve, pressed his advantage further still.
"We'll bring the girls along. Mary looks like she could do with a bit of entertainment herself, and Nell besides—"
"Absolutely not." Isaac's refusal on this point carried more force than his earlier reluctance. "A tavern crowd watching a prizefight is no place for either of them."
"I should like to see one," Mary said, with such immediate and enthusiastic conviction that both men turned toward her in evident surprise.
"I've heard tales of such fights my whole life—half the men in my village boast of matches they claim to have seen, though I suspect most of them are lying through their teeth about it—and I've never once witnessed one myself.
I'd like the chance, if it's not too much trouble. "
Helena, caught off guard by her own curiosity as much as by Mary's sudden boldness, found herself agreeing before she'd fully considered the wisdom of it.
"I confess I'm curious as well."
Isaac studied the two of them for a long moment, plainly searching for some further objection, and finding none sufficient to overcome Tom's enthusiasm and Mary's evident determination combined, finally exhaled in reluctant surrender.
"Stay close to Tom and myself, both of you, and we leave the moment either of you wishes to."
The small party made their way inside the tavern. It quickly proved unlike anything Helena had ever experienced in the whole of her sheltered life.
Music competed with the general roar of a hundred overlapping conversations, tankards slammed against rough wooden tables in time to some private rhythm of their own.
Men shouted odds and counter-odds across the crowded room with an energy that felt almost dangerously alive, and the whole space hung thick with smoke and ale and the particular close warmth of too many bodies.
She felt, for the first several minutes, out of place.
Every instinct bred into her by years of careful drawing rooms recoiled from the noise and closeness of it all.
But Mary seemed to feel none of the same hesitation, her eyes bright with open fascination as she took in every detail of the growing crowd gathering around a rough square marked out with rope near the tavern's centre.
The evening settled, gradually at first, and then into something Helena found herself genuinely enjoying despite every expectation to the contrary.
Tom held court over a corner table with a string of increasingly exaggerated stories from his fighting days, each one growing more improbable in the telling until even Isaac, listening with an ease Helena had rarely seen from him, was laughing freely.
The sound of it lodged itself somewhere warm in her chest.
The tavern's patrons, labourers and merchants and off-duty servants, none of them troubled in the slightest by questions of rank or title, moved through the crowded room with an unselfconscious enjoyment.
And Helena found these more comfortable than the careful, calculated pleasantries of any London ballroom she had ever attended.
It could not last, of course.
The recognition came from somewhere near the makeshift ring: a burly, weathered man who had evidently fought in his own day, squinting through the smoke and lamplight before his face split into open astonishment.
"That's Rowan! Isaac Rowan, as I live and breathe!"
The name travelled through the crowd with astonishing speed, heads turning one after another until Isaac found himself the sudden centre of the tavern's entire attention. The noise swelled as more and more voices took up the shout.
Several men began a rhythmic chant that made Isaac's expression shift from startled discomfort into something more resistant.
It was clear what they were calling for: they wanted Isaac to fight.
"Those days are behind me," he said, more than once, waving off the growing clamour with a firmness that the crowd seemed disinclined to accept.
The chanting only grew louder. But it was the evening's local champion, the man the poster had named as "Bulldog Harris," who stepped forward from the crowd with the easy swagger of someone well accustomed to admiration.
"Come now, My Lord," the young fighter called, grinning broadly enough that the challenge carried more genuine good humour than any real animosity, "surely the great Isaac Rowan hasn't forgotten how it's done, title or no title.
One friendly round, for old times' sake—I'll not even hold it against you if age has slowed your hands some. "
The tavern roared its approval. Even Tom, Helena noticed with some surprise, had begun adding his own encouragement to the general clamour, grinning at Isaac with open delight.
Isaac held out for several minutes longer, but the sheer weight of the crowd's enthusiasm, combined with Tom's evident encouragement, finally wore through whatever reluctance remained.
He rose from the table with a resigned, faintly amused shake of his head that set the whole tavern into fresh eruptions of cheering.
Helena watched, scarcely able to believe what she was witnessing, as Isaac shrugged out of his coat and rolled his shirtsleeves back with the same unhurried, practised ease she remembered from the training barn.
He stepped through the roped square to a roar of approval loud enough to rattle the tavern's windows.
The moment the match began, something in him transformed.
The composed, careful baron who had spent the past week listening patiently to tenant grievances and negotiating fairly with market merchants disappeared. Instead, he was replaced by a man who moved with a speed and precision that left Helena's breath caught somewhere in her throat.
Every strike landed with an economical, controlled power that spoke of years of hard-won mastery rather than mere strength alone.
He avoided the local champion's heavier blows with an ease that looked almost effortless, answering each with a precise counter that drew fresh roars from the assembled crowd, and within only a handful of rounds the match had concluded in his favour, Isaac helping his more battered opponent back to his feet with a warmth that earned him as much applause as the victory itself.
Helena could not tear her eyes away from him.
She had watched him at his most vulnerable, bandaging his split knuckles by candlelight, and at his most uncertain, staring at an arrangement of dinner forks with open bewilderment.
She had watched him charm a room full of aristocrats who had once mocked him openly and listen with genuine patience to tenant farmers whose troubles most lords would never have bothered to hear.
But she had never seen this, this fearless, commanding physical mastery, a man entirely at ease in his own considerable strength.
And the sight of it left her emotions tangled.
The contrast fascinated her beyond anything she was prepared to admit--the same hands that had gently corrected her stance in the training barn, that had wrapped a careful bandage around her injured knuckles, now commanding a whole roaring tavern's rapt attention with controlled, deliberate violence.
"You'll draw the whole tavern's notice," Mary murmured beside her, with a knowing nudge of her elbow, "if you keep staring quite so hard, Nell."
Helena tore her gaze away at once, heat rushing to her cheeks, and busied herself with adjusting her shawl in a poor attempt to disguise how thoroughly she'd been caught.
The cheer that followed Isaac's victory swelled through the tavern in waves of cheering and back-slapping congratulation.
Only when the noise finally began to settle did Isaac climb back out through the ropes, his shirt still damp with exertion. And as he straightened, his gaze swept across the crowded room and found her.
Their eyes met across the tavern's noisy distance. Neither looked away.
The whole roaring chaos of the room seemed, for several suspended seconds, to recede into the distance. An unimportant background hum, where nothing remained but the steady, unbroken thread of his gaze holding hers.
Helena felt, in that charged and silent stretch of time, every careful wall she had spent the past week rebuilding begin to collapse.
Then the crowd surged forward, well-wishers and admirers closing around Isaac in a jostling wave of congratulation, and the moment broke as suddenly as it had formed, leaving Helena standing alone amid the tavern's noise with her heart hammering.