Chapter Twelve

A lice was enjoying her fourth day of being home. Settled into a routine with the help and permission of Mrs. Georgie, Jenny, Henry, and a few others who made up the household, she had been accepted into their midst. She ate what they ate and where they ate it, which turned out to be in the formal dining room because they still thought it to be an exciting lark.

The gorgeous mahogany table that had been there all Alice’s life had been sold, along with the crystal chandelier. But Henry and one of his grandsons, who helped provide food for the household, had crafted a new table from barn boards. With a lace tablecloth over it, it served the purpose well. With the mismatched chairs, enough for all of them, Alice thought it a merry group.

While her parents’ former staff wouldn’t let her clean, do laundry, or even beat the few remaining carpets, they let her exercise the two old horses, help in the gardens, and even assist in the kitchen.

By Mrs. Georgie’s side, Alice snapped the ends off the runner beans and peeled potatoes, grateful they had food. She hadn’t yet needed to delve into her meager savings. No one had asked her for back wages, for which she was exceedingly grateful.

Henry’s grandson, Bert, a tall youth of eighteen, burst in through the kitchen’s back door, leading to the herb garden.

“You made me jump,” Mrs. Georgie said. “If you do it again, I’ll take my ladle to your backside. See if I don’t.”

“Sorry,” Bert mumbled. Today, he didn’t do what he usually did, which was scan the room for Jenny. Instead, he said excitedly, “We have a visitor!”

Mrs. Georgie looked at Alice, probably thinking the last thing they needed was another mouth to feed.

“Shall I see who it is?” Alice offered.

“It’s your home, m’lady.” She said it without animosity, as if Alice had become the hostess the moment she’d arrived back at Stonely Grange.

“Very well.” After wiping her hands upon her apron, Alice turned to Bert. “Where is our guest?”

“A carriage drove into the stable yard, and Granddad told me to fetch someone. Looks to belong to a right nob, m’lady, if you’ll excuse my saying the word.”

Alice nodded and went to go out the same door the lad had come through.

“No, m’lady, Granddad said he’d send the snout-nose to the main entrance, if you’ll excuse my saying the word.”

“Why don’t you stop saying such things, then?” Mrs. Georgie berated, and Bert dipped his head.

“It’s no matter,” Alice said, “but I’ll go out back and intercept our guest. Seems a bit silly to stand on ceremony when there are no chairs in which to be seated afterward.”

Mrs. Georgie chuckled. “You have the right of it, m’lady.”

Alice had her fingers on the door handle when the cook stopped her.

“Your apron,” Mrs. George reminded her. “You aren’t the hired help.”

Sending the cook a wry smile, since no one was paid anymore, Alice shrugged. “The honest garment of an honest worker,” she quipped before heading outside.

She hadn’t gone but five or six steps when she saw him . Adam had descended from a fine carriage and was standing in the yard. Her heart squeezed, the breath left her lungs in a whoosh , then returned in a gasp, and her mind denied the possibility of his being there.

How had he found her?

“You are the gardener and the groom?” Adam asked, trying to work out why the older man who had been tending a plot of vegetables had dropped his hoe, hurried over, and said he would bring the horses some water.

“No, m’lord. Rather, yes, m’lord. Actually, we don’t have a groom no more.”

The driver Adam had hired at the Reading train station jumped down.

“They’re spirited beasts, Henry. They might lift you off your feet,” he warned good naturedly, obviously knowing the older man.

Adam could easily imagine the short and slight Henry sent flying with a flick of the lead rope.

“I’ll be fine,” the gardener said with a chuckle. “Got a couple buckets roundabout here somewhere.”

But instead of hurrying off to find them, he looked at Adam.

“Nothing to worry about, m’lord, but Mr. Shaw, here,” he hooked a thumb at the driver, “has brought you round back.”

“Naturally, I did,” the man said, crossing his arms. “No point in going to the front, now, is there?”

Adam had no idea what they were jabbering about.

“Nonsense,” Henry said. “If his lordship wants to enter through the front, he may.” The gardener addressed Adam again. “I say, if you want to go around to the front, my grandson has gone inside to send someone to greet you.”

When the man gestured toward the back of the house, Adam let his gaze follow where he pointed. While the gardens were kept well enough, the house needed care. There were roofing tiles missing, trim hanging askew, and a distinct air of shabbiness.

He knew from his parents’ country estate that a manor house such as this ought to have an army of staff constantly maintaining its upkeep. Instead, he’d seen a single wizened old man and a youth who’d disappeared inside.

The white-painted door through which the purported grandson had gone suddenly opened.

“Never you mind, m’lord. Here comes her ladyship now,” the gardener added.

A lovely, honey-haired female exited the house, wiping her hands on her apron. She stopped after a few feet and gawked at him.

Adam stared back at Alice. Despite her changed appearance, he would have recognized her anywhere. Today, she wore a functional kerchief on her head with her hair coming over one shoulder in a long braid. Her dress was a plain, faun-colored cotton and over it, she wore an apron. He would swear it was a maid’s apron.

Yet the old man had called Alice “her ladyship.” The mystery thickened, but at least he’d found her. By the expression upon her face, she was none too happy that he had.

“I shall send word when I need to be collected,” he told Mr. Shaw, and then he left the two men behind. Although trying to maintain a dignified gait as he approached her, Adam wanted to run, irrationally thinking she might vanish before his eyes.

“My lady,” he greeted, unable to keep the teasing tone from his voice. “No longer Mrs. Malcolm, the knowledgeable governess?”

“I doubt the quantity or caliber of my knowledge has changed any. How did you find me?” she asked bluntly. No smile, no kind and gentle greeting as he’d hoped. But as she shielded her eyes from the late sun turning her hair to a thick, golden rope, her gaze flickered over him from head to toe.

When the youth who’d accompanied her had taken Adam’s trunk from the driver and the others had departed, he answered her.

“You left me a clue, Lady Alice.”

She visibly startled before she regained her composure.

“My book,” she said after a moment. “I wondered whether it was one with my bookplate in it. I gave it to you in such a rush that day.”

“Yes, the bookplate.”

She shook her head, perhaps at her own carelessness.

“Why did you come?” she asked.

That question was not one he could easily answer, especially not standing in the stable yard. And thus, he said the most obvious one.

“To return it.”

She offered an exasperated huff. “You could have sent it by messenger.”

Deflated by her reception, Adam took her words like a kick in the gut. She really wasn’t happy to see him and would rather the book had shown up in brown paper, delivered by a stranger.

“Are you not pleased to see me?” He hated to ask, feeling vulnerable in an unfamiliar way. Not that he’d expected her to run into his arms and let him sweep her off her feet, but the underlying hostility he detected was new and unwelcome.

“It’s not that,” she said, glancing around her. But she said nothing more, with unfathomable emotions swimming in the depths of her lovely eyes. Maybe the hostility was shame at her circumstances, but it looked more like fear.

What had he stumbled into?

If the gardener hadn’t called her a lady, Adam might have assumed she’d taken a lesser position than a governess as a scullery maid.

“You have a piece of potato peeling on your apron.”

Absently, she brushed it off. “You didn’t come all this way, a hundred miles, to return my book, nor tidy my clothing. What do you want?”

“It wasn’t a hundred miles, only about seventy-five. At this moment, I want to go indoors. I would like a glass of cool ale if you have it. I wish to speak frankly with you, and then I hope to have a bed to sleep in. If after all that, our business is concluded, then I shall leave tomorrow.”

“Our business?” she repeated.

Was she going to deny him entrance and the barest of explanations? He waited while she chewed her lower lip.

“Fine, then. Come inside, but I warn you, Lord Diamond, my family’s home is a shell of its former state. And there are no servants, only friends who live together because they have nowhere else to go.”

He couldn’t deny that statement shocked him. No servants?

And her last statement, did that include herself?

“What about you, Lady Alice? Do you have nowhere else?”

“Especially me,” she said quietly and led him inside.

Adam hadn’t known what to expect indoors — maybe pigs being kept in the drawing room and pigeons in the pantry. Instead, it was room after room of emptiness. It appeared as if the Jeffrey family had moved out, taken their belongings, and left a handful of people behind.

Friends , Alice had called them. Yet they were behaving as staff. He’d been immediately offered tea by a woman who must be the cook. A younger one introducing herself as Jenny said she would make up a room for him, then looked bewildered and asked Alice where his lordship should be placed. They had gone off together to find something suitable, giving him time to walk around the ground floor.

There was nothing in the drawing room except an ugly candlestick on the floor by the hearth and a single torn ottoman, making an already large space seem cavernous. The same for each room he wandered into except the dining room, which had a crude semblance of a place to eat. On the second floor, he pushed open a door expecting more of the same, and his breath caught.

It was a library with shelf upon shelf of books.

That’s where Alice found him sometime later.

“Astonishing, isn’t it?” she remarked.

He turned from the shelf he was scanning, this one full of history books. With her apron and kerchief off, she looked more like the woman he knew and with whom he had fallen in love if he was entirely honest with himself. Yet still, she did not appear like the lady of this house or any. Far too plainly dressed and with too much worry upon her face.

“This room does seem to be a miracle when every other room has been decimated of what one might consider normal furnishings. How was it spared the Viking raid?”

She laughed, looking years younger, like a teenager.

“A few days ago, I walked in here, my favorite room in the house, prepared for the worst. I swear I shrieked so loudly Mrs. Georgie — that’s our cook, before and still — she came running. I asked her exactly what you asked me. How could it still be a library?”

He moved closer to her, hoping to catch her familiar scent.

“What was her answer?”

“The idiots who took everything thought a bunch of musty books had no value.” Her smile when she finished that statement was breathtaking.

“And who were these illiterate blunderheads?”

Her smiled died. “They are no longer important.”

By the set of her lips, she wasn’t going to tell him. At least not then.

“Where is the rest of your family? Your parents? You said they left the country?”

Nodding, she strolled over to the closest shelf and ran a hand across the lined-up spines, straightening one that was less than half an inch out of order.

“I am an only child. Two others died before the age of five.” Then a book caught her fancy. She drew out the thin volume, opened it, and smiled. “My parents are in Spain. Two years ago, they fled this disaster for which they blame me.”

With that, she snapped the book closed and replaced it.

“Two years ago, you said you were widowed. Is that true?”

“It is.” She immediately changed the topic. “We have that ale you requested, as well as some cold chicken and bread. Are you hungry?”

“Thank you, I am.”

The dining room, which he’d already noticed, was ... rustic but functional. After taking him in, she went to fetch the food herself.

“I shall return shortly.”

Adam watched her leave and speculated upon the state of Stonely Grange and the “idiots” who had taken everything. When she returned with a tray, he rushed forward to take it from her.

“You are in an extraordinary circumstance, are you not?”

Alice sat at the table, despite not having brought herself any food, and gestured for him to eat.

“I suppose this life is nothing I could have imagined,” she agreed. “But I am fortunate to have a roof over my head, nonetheless.”

“Will you tell me your story?”

When she briefly closed her eyes as if shutting him out, he persisted, “Aren’t we close enough friends for you to confide in me? I promise you I am not the least judgmental, and I hold you in the highest esteem.”

He waited. Her eyelids fluttered open, and she examined her fingernails, tapped them on the table, looked around the room, and even sighed.

“And I am persistent,” he added, for he was not going to ride away and leave the mystery of Lady Alice Malcolm Jeffrey in his wake.

“You are,” she agreed, looking at him again. “I am still astonished to see you.”

He had hoped by expressing his admiration, her gaze might appear more joyful, but that was not the case.

“I never expected you to be sitting here,” she admitted softly. Then she shook her head. “A few years ago, I married Lord Richard Fairclough. I thought he was a decent, kind man. He was neither. I left my home here and traveled to London with him, from a dream to a nightmare, as it were. He was a drunkard, always very arf’arf’an’arf no matter the time of day. He was also a hopeless gambler who was either easily bilked or extraordinarily unlucky. And a profligate spend-all.”

“But did he have any bad traits?” Adam asked, hoping the jest would make her smile. After all, the man was dead. However, Alice barely lifted one side of her luscious mouth in a mostly wry expression.

“Luckily, we never had children, and even more fortunately, he died. And that is my story. Not a particularly interesting one.”

“I beg to differ.” Adam had hung on her every word, looking into the depths of her gray-green eyes. He wanted to remove the sadness he saw there but didn’t know how to go about it.

Moreover, he knew the story had more to it, with facets she hadn’t yet revealed.

“Who ravaged your family home?”

“People to whom Fairclough owed money, I believe, sent here by his brother. The house was gifted to me by my parents. In turn, it had been gifted to my father with the same restrictions regarding selling it. While my husband could not sell the estate outright by the terms of its legal trust — thank God! — naturally, he owned everything in it. There was nothing I nor my parents could do but let everything be taken and sold to pay Fairclough’s debts.”

“How awful.” Adam had lost his appetite, but she spoke so matter-of-factly, he knew she’d long ago accepted the circumstances. She certainly wasn’t grieving over the reprobate, nor devastated and heartbroken.

“Thoughtlessly, or perhaps maliciously, Fairclough did not leave our London home to me. It, too, was sold quickly by his brother, Gerald, the new Lord Fairclough. Thus, with no money and no roof over my head in London, I left and decided it better to be a governess than a tragically impoverished widow. No one recognized me until I started dressing up and going out to places a governess should not be.”

“With me,” he finished.

“Yes, but I did enjoy our outings,” she confessed, offering him the first real smile since he’d arrived.

Suddenly, he recalled the name, and Alice’s speedy departure made a little more sense.

“You left Bath because of that woman who addressed you as Lady Fairclough?”

“I did.”

“But why?” Adam hoped she would continue talking. Inside, he was a little shaken to think of all the times they were together with her pretending to be the middle-class Mrs. Malcolm, and he’d believed her.

“If it happened once, it would happen again,” she explained. “I allowed myself the indulgence of going to a ball, being in a setting which would bring my true identity to people’s minds. And I didn’t want Lord and Lady Beasley to know whom they had actually hired. They would have sacked me for the ruse, and I would have had to leave, but then, everyone in Bath would have known who had been in their midst. You know how the servants’ grapevine works, do you not?”

“I believe I understand the concept,” Adam said wryly. “Yet you left, anyway.”

“On my own terms. And without all the snooty nobs in Bath —”

“Your fellow nobs, if I am grasping the situation correctly.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “My father is an earl and my mother is a viscount’s daughter. They hoped I would marry in my first Season. With my mother’s unusual chaperoning skills, too lax when I needed her and rather forceful when she saw an opportunity to push me in the wrong direction — into the wrong arms, as it were — my parents got their wish.”

“Are you saying your parents approved of Fairclough?” Now that Adam knew the name, memories of a thundering reprobate floated through his brain. He’d never met him, but the man had once lost so badly at cards, it was the stuff of legend at White’s. And he was equally unfortunate at common wagering, losing so much he was right up the list with Beau Brummel.

“Approved is too strong a word,” Alice said. “They didn’t really care who it was, as long as he was from our class, of course, and he didn’t mind that my dowry was not a large one. He thought he would have this estate to sell. I didn’t find out until later that my father had never told Richard of the restrictions on the deed. In any case, unable to stop our belongings from being sold, my parents packed up and left for the less expensive and far sunnier Spain.”

Adam could not imagine such negligent parents leaving their offspring, and a female, at that, to fend for herself. How could his Alice have come from such weak and cowardly people?

“And now you are back, is your plan to remain here indefinitely?”

Again, she sighed. “I honestly did not know what I would find here. Stonely Grange might have been burned to the ground for all I knew. Believe it or not, even seeing it like this, in its ravished state, I am vastly relieved. And then, of course, there is the library.”

“Therefore, the intrepid Lady Fairclough —”

“Don’t call me that,” she interrupted with a scowl.

“And so, Lady Alice intends to live in her hulking, empty house with her handful of friends , reading her beloved books until...?”

“Why must there be an until?” she asked, blinking at him.

“I don’t know that there must. But is that the life you want? Peaceful, I suppose, but devoid of that fun and companionship you enjoyed with me in Bath.”

With a shrug, she looked away. “I think I will stay as long as I can. And when I cannot, then I shall go be a governess somewhere remote, thereby removing the possibility of a nosy-poke yelling my name.”

He wondered if she would prefer that life to being with him.

“Do you intend never to reclaim your place as a member of the ton, nor return to London?”

She shook her head. “I cannot return to London.” Rising to her feet, she added, “I promised Mrs. Georgie that I would help make preserves, or was it pickles? Anyway, something to do with jars.”

Adam had stood, too, and now he moved around the table, wanting to put them back on the same footing they had been before she had vanished. Hoping she would allow him, he reached for her hand.

When she didn’t flinch or pull away, he took the other one, too. Feeling as if he were coming home, he pulled her close.

“I missed you.”

She nodded but was staring in the vicinity of his pale gray necktie.

“It was unkind of you to leave without saying goodbye or telling me where you were going.”

“I know,” her voice was husky. “If I spoke with you, you would have asked all sorts of questions. Or tried to stop me.”

“Alice, I don’t care if you are a lady or a governess. You know that, don’t you?”

“I suppose so.”

He released one of her hands so he could tilt her chin up and look into her eyes. How he adored her clear, interesting eyes! They reminded him of the solid strength of all nature — rocks and trees and ancient beings.

Except at that moment, he could see the glittering of unshed tears.

“Tell me,” he said.

After a moment, she swallowed. “I missed you, too. I thought I would never see you again.”

He didn’t wait. Adam leaned down and kissed her, reveling in the familiar jolt of warmth and desire. She felt it, too, by the way her hands came up and her fingers clasped his jacket, holding him in place.

When he slanted his mouth across hers and demanded access with a sweep of his tongue along her soft lips, she leaned against him. Opening her mouth to his gentle assault, at the same time, she laced her fingers behind his neck, holding on to him as if her life depended upon it.

No one was going to interrupt — no Lady Susanne nor Lady Beasley, no butler nor assembly room manager. And she no longer had a governess’s morality to protect.

Nothing and no one outside of the two of them mattered. Adam lost track of how long he explored her mouth, caressed her tongue with his, and felt her ardent reciprocation.

“Alice,” he said against her mouth. “ My Alice.”

Was she? In his heart, he felt she was. But she was an enigma, and he had no idea if she—

“Take me,” she whispered. Then added, “Upstairs.”

He drew back, thinking to sweep her into his arms, but she grabbed his hand, gave him a shy smile that set his blood to boiling, and led the way.