Chapter Fifteen

A full two minutes passed before Jack remembered he had Harriet with him. He slowed Shadow to a walk, and she brought Peggy up beside him, her expression puzzled, but some of the earlier wariness dissipated.

“Do you not care for Captain Carlyon?”

Well, she could speak her mind when the inclination took her, that was for certain. What to say? “The man irritates me.” Something of an understatement, but he could hardly tell her the truth, could he? He didn’t want her guessing why he didn’t want Fitz Carlyon poking about near Bessie’s Cove, or she might go poking about herself.

“I gathered that.” A hint of wryness in her voice. Had he been that obvious? At least she’d lost her look of a dog waiting to be beaten, but that might have more to do with Ysella’s cheerful influence and the fact that their ride was nearly over. She was now studying him with a small frown between her eyes as though he himself was a mystery waiting to be solved. What had Ysella said to her? Not that she knew anything of his more clandestine activities, because she didn’t. Not with the way her tongue was inclined to run away with itself when she got excited.

He shrugged. “The man doesn’t like me, either.”

Harriet smiled, this time a natural smile rather than a forced one, her face transformed for an instant into a vision of loveliness. “I had the impression on our brief acquaintance that the person the good Captain is fondest of is himself.”

Jack couldn’t help a grin. “You have hit the nail right on the head. He is indeed a man very fond of his own importance and also of his ‘successes’ with the fairer sex. He sees himself as irresistible. And as that importance is, shall we say, important , then I suppose I have to say he has the right to be. Or, rather, he sees himself as having the right.”

They’d reached where drooping trees, still heavy with summer foliage that was just beginning to turn, overhung the track down to the coast, and Jack was forced to duck. Harriet steered Peggy around them with neat aplomb. “Is that the only reason you don’t like him?”

Her forthright questions took him aback, forcing him to consider the real reasons why he didn’t like Captain Carlyon. Fitz, as he liked to be known by his acquaintances, although he probably wouldn’t encourage such familiarity from Jack, the man he was pursuing. Jack wasn’t about to reveal all of those reasons to Harriet, whom he’d known only for the blink of an eye, although rather puzzlingly that blink of an eye felt like forever.

“I, er…” he floundered. “He’s a sight too curious for his own good.” There, that was an answer without having lied. It would have to do.

Harriet tilted her chin towards him. “And you are a very private person?”

Was he? He’d never thought of himself that way but perhaps it was how others saw him. “Yes.” Easiest to admit it. “How astute of you.”

“I don’t know you well enough to have worked that out for myself. Ysella told me. She revealed all your secrets to me.” She fixed him with a direct gaze, as though willing him to come clean to her himself.

Not all of them, hopefully. Neither she nor Sam knew of his cross-channel trading. Kit, Ysella’s brother knew, because he’d been in the trade himself until he’d found himself a wife and a musket ball in the arm, much at the same time. Sam and Ysella, of course, knew what Kit had been up to, before that midnight raid by the revenue men, led by Fitz Carlyon, had put a stop to it. However, they knew nothing of what still went on, and Kit would never have welched on someone else’s involvement. Jack frowned. If he could, he intended to keep it that way, even if it led to people calling him a ‘very private man’.

He managed a smile. Impossible not to smile at her, in truth. “For someone who only knows me through her husband and brother, Ysella presumes a lot to think she’s revealed all my secrets.”

Harriet dropped her gaze and patted Peggy’s sweaty shoulder. “Perhaps I should have said she told me what she knows. That you live with your mother, that Rosudgeon is yours, bequeathed to you by your father…” Here she paused, as though waiting for him to add something.

He didn’t.

She gave an infinitesimal shrug and kept going. “And that she has never seen you riding out with a lady.” The smile edged its way onto her face for a moment, almost conspiratorial in its nature. “Everyone has to have a few secrets they keep only to themselves.”

Damn it. What had Ysella, with her love of gossip, revealed? But… did Harriet’s words mean she had secrets as well? That she didn’t want anyone to know? Something that made her as wary, in her way, as he was. Something that brought that look of fear into her eyes before she could veil it.

He’d consider that later. But for now, damn Ysella. Might she have let slip about his father? It wasn’t a secret amongst his friends, and many of the country folk knew as well, and no one seemed to hold it against him. Did Ysella even know? She’d not been brought up down here, and she was a good eight years younger than he was. But, rumor being what it was, even if you did live right on the westernmost tip of Cornwall as she did, she might have heard talk and gained an inkling, even though his mother had done her best to keep it quiet. Servants, on the other hand, could rarely keep juicy secrets.

Making the decision to ignore the possibility Harriet knew of his parentage, he guided Shadow around a large pothole before replying. “There are very few ladies who would dream of being seen riding with me, Harriet.”

She peeked sideways at him, for once almost coquettish and the hunted look gone. “Have I made a faux pas in agreeing to ride out with you, then? Will it ruin my reputation?”

“Undoubtedly. I am seen as a ne’er do well by the landed gentry in this part of Cornwall, unless they happen to be my friends. A ne’er-do-well who has chosen the sea over the ballroom and turned my back on society. And as for my friends, I pick and choose who those are.”

This didn’t appear to have disturbed her as he’d expected it to. Was she warming to him? “These landed gentry who turn their noses up at you, if they don’t know me or see me riding with you, they will not be at liberty to consider my reputation damaged. Let it be our secret.”

With the end of their ride in sight, her confidence appeared to be mounting. Had she been afraid he might do something untoward, heaven forbid ungentlemanly, when they were riding alone? She did indeed seem different now to how she’d been at the start of the ride. Confident enough to tease him. “You take this in your stride, as though facing a fence out hunting.”

She nodded. “I have had many fences to face over the years, and not just on the hunting field.” Her brow furrowed as though a memory troubled her. “But I won’t bore you with my tales. Look, we’re nearly at Rosudgeon. I’ll dismount here and walk down the track to Keynvor.”

“We can ride down there together, and I can bring Peggy back afterwards.”

She shook her head. “No. I insist. I think my legs would appreciate the walk, as this was quite a long ride for my first time in the saddle in sixteen years.”

Irritation coursed through him. Damn it. He wanted to have the chance to ride longer with her, to walk slowly down to her cottage and perhaps tarry a little for refreshment provided by the inestimable Bertha. And yet here she was, giving him the brush off as though he were just a casual acquaintance. Which he supposed he was. He searched for something to keep her with him longer as she placed her reins into one hand and unhooked her right leg from the pommel.

“You must have been a child bride.”

She hesitated, that haunted look back in her eyes. “I was seventeen.”

“A child indeed.”

She made a little moue with her mouth. “It was that or say goodbye to the man I fancied myself in love with.” Her hand went to her mouth as though she hadn’t meant to say this, and she shook her head. “Perhaps you have experience of the hot-headedness of girls?”

He barely heard her last words. Fancied herself in love with? Had she not, then, loved her husband? Might she not be as deeply in mourning as he had thought? With his scanty knowledge of marriage, gleaned only from his working-class friends, he had little idea how those from the upper classes undertook it, but he’d always understood marriage to have been for love. He’d learned that at his mother’s knee, and from watching his friends like Sam and Ysella and the Treloars. His mother had loved his father all Jack’s life, and still did, more fool her.

He slid down from Shadow and came around to help Harriet down from Peggy. She slid into his arms and, for just a moment, he allowed himself to hang onto her, the urge to crush her to his chest waxing strong.

Beneath his hands, her body stiffened at his touch, and she stepped out of his hold, her cheeks a little pinker than they had been. “Thank you so much… Jack, for allowing me to indulge my love of horses.” The words came out stilted, as though forced between her teeth, and she took another step back from him, her eyes lowered, all the old barrier built back even higher than before. “I very much enjoyed our ride.” She hitched up the spare fabric of her habit and turned away.

“Will you be all right walking that far in your habit? You won’t trip?” Now he sounded like an idiot, babbling on, when clearly, she was in firm control of the situation. Just for a few minutes, he’d felt a kind of ease beginning to grow between them, and now she was all bristling hedgehog again, curled in a fetal ball to keep him away.

She hitched her skirts a little more. “I shall be quite all right. It’s not far, and the walk might ease out any aches and pains that are creeping up on me after my ride.” She bobbed her head to him in a dainty curtsey, still without meeting his eyes. “Thank you again for this treat.”

And she set off down the track without a backward glance. He watched her out of sight around the bend by the farm, willing her to turn around and look back at him, but she didn’t. She must have put him out of her mind straight away. No doubt with ease. He stood a little longer considering how he was feeling, the two horses swishing their tails at a few flies.

Confused. Puzzled by her sudden change. Had it been when she’d felt his hands on her waist? Had that done it? Had she perhaps sensed his desire to hold her close and been shocked?

He shook his head in frustration. What was it about her that had him this way? His first instinct, on hearing she’d taken Keynvor Cottage, had been one of horror at finding some outsider right on the doorstep of the two hidden coves where he usually brought ashore his contraband. His next instinct had been to involve her family in their deeds in some way and thus frighten her into keeping silent, in the nicest possible way. This third instinct, which had overwhelmed the other two at startling speed, was not one he was used to. An instinct to protect her that he’d never felt towards any other woman.

She’d be heading down the hill now and nearing where the track forked, going right towards her cottage and Old Tummel’s hovel on the headland. Turning away from the left fork, which led towards Bessie’s kiddley and Will’s house at Porth en Alls above Prussia Cove. The bits he didn’t want her prying into, for all their sakes.

His mind wandered. That maidservant of hers, Bertha, would be waiting for her with the kettle singing on the hob, wanting to know how her ride had gone. Her children too, perhaps with eager questions about where she’d been. Would she tell Theo what his great-aunt had in mind for him? Probably not.

The children placated, she’d be going upstairs to take off her habit… Here, Jack’s imagination began to run away with him somewhat, his tight breeches becoming uncomfortable and sweat standing out on his brow. No. She was a lady, not some girl from a tap room with morals looser than her drawers. He’d best not go there.

Shadow nudged him in the back, dragging him out of his speculative musings and back to reality. Grabbing Peggy’s reins, he led the two horses in at the gates of Rosudgeon and up the gravel drive, steeling himself for his mother’s inevitable inquisition.