Chapter 11

CHAPTER ELEVEN

H olme Hall was the wildest, loneliest, most isolated place Leda had ever seen.

It was also the most beautiful.

The landscape had changed when they left Cambridgeshire and entered the Fens, low-lying marshes that could not decide whether to be land or sea, and which reeked the rich smell of growing things. They passed the town of Ely, with the towers of its great cathedral climbing the sky, and Jack made her laugh with stories of his eccentric schoolmasters.

At Lynn Regis, the air smelled of salt, and the spires and towers of more medieval buildings combed the heavens. They traded their comfortable chaise and the turnpike road for a dog cart and a rutted track that led north through pasture and common and small flocks of trees, and the smell of salt marsh came with them.

Jack pointed out the long, grey outline of Castle Rising, where Isabella of France, the guilty widow of Edward II, had lived out her exile. They passed Snettisham, which he said was the nearest market town, then small cliffs like curled waves where chalk had been dug from the ground, and a scatter of ruins he called Ringstead Parva.

He pointed to a wooded clump to the east where sat Hunstanton Hall in its park, home of the ancient Le Strange family and currently the domain of the Reverend Armine Styleman. Then the lane turned east and the thin line on the horizon advanced into a band of blue Jack called The Wash, and Leda felt she'd arrived at the furthest reaches of the known world.

The house rose straight from the ground with no gracious setting of sculpted parterres or naturalized landscaping, simply walls of stone angled up from the earth in the blocky Jacobean style. Crenellations lined the roof, their forbidding outline offset by homey chimneys sprouting along the length, one quietly breathing smoke. The tall arched windows were set with red brick facing, accenting the blocky gray stone of the walls, lined with what looked like large pebbles.

"Flint," Jack said, watching her study the building. "It's a common building material around here, as much as brick."

Brick walls encased the front and sides of the building in concentric rectangles, holding off the wind to shelter gardens, a regular set of treetops that suggested an orchard, and most likely animal pens. As they approached the rock-clad outbuildings came into sight, organized into a neat horseshoe at the rear of the house. Holme Hall seemed enormous, framed against clumps of gray clouds that drifted and spun out overhead. The wind carried sea spray, salt marsh, and the high brr-eek, brr-eek of curlews.

Leda shivered and pulled her cloak tight to her shoulders. She wasn't cold, but the wind rushed through her as if she were hollow, awakening a sudden ache.

The place was austere, but it was a home. She hadn't had a home in so long.

Jack turned onto the pebbled drive fronting the house. The boy they'd hired in Lynn Regis to return the cart, who was currently riding the near horse, stared as curiously as Leda.

"Oi, so here's the place as the Mad Baron lives!" he marveled. "Yew ain't afreard he'll do yew in, sir?" He twisted around to regard Jack. "A thack on the hid, a toss ore the cliff, and downards you go." He whistled as he curved his hand through the air, mimicking a falling body.

Jack winced. "Famous all the way in Lynn Regis, is he?"

The boy nodded solemnly. "Int many ghosties an'orl in these places. They's the Edward Queen in Rising and the Henry Queen in Blickling, an ta. The Mad Baron's bride." He gestured toward the house.

Leda bit her lip. Anywhere else, she'd have caught Jack's eye, shared a smirk of knowing amusement with him. But here, in the shadow of his home, he was not amused. And the wild air about the place made Leda feel very far from the stately, civilized rooms of Bath, where under the light of many candles and the crowds of gracious revelers, superstitions held no purchase. On these cliffs and fens, where the land stood so empty all about, a specter might take form, grow teeth.

Bird calls pierced the air, a noisy chorus, but the house sat quiet. No shadows passed before the windows inside, and outside, nothing moved save for the wind in the branches of a lone holm oak holding its crooked arms toward the sky. A brown goose with pink feet poked through the scrubby grass that lined the drive.

Leda hadn't been this nervous about meeting her husband. She'd known at the time she wouldn't get on with Bertram Toplady. But she very much wished for Muriel to like her, and the worry crashed through her stomach like the sound of waves not far away, somewhere out of sight.

Jack seemed nervous, too. He'd been stiff and scrupulously correct through their entire second day of travel, sitting upright in the chaise as if he feared he might slump and accidentally touch her. They took their supper at opposite ends of the table in a private parlor he arranged and said a formal goodnight at the door of the separate rooms he paid for.

And she had a chaperone, of sorts. Early in the morning before they left Swindon, Leda had entered the kitchens of their inn and before the bread was finished baking found a girl willing to travel with them as their maid, lending an air of respectability. With as quickly as she was ready to leave, Leda sensed that Grace Haycot was escaping something, or someone, and she had half expected the girl to peel off in Cambridge, or Lynn Regis, ready to seek her fortune in town.

Leda also suspected that young Grace carried a secret that would, in five or six months, make her ineligible for service in a genteel household. But as Grace had not broached the matter to Leda, Leda would not raise it to her. Instead, she watched as the girl hopped down from the dog cart, collecting her string bag.

"What's that and all about a ghost?" she asked the boy.

"A local superstition, I gather." Leda turned to find Jack holding out his hand to her.

Sometime in the journey, he had stopped being Brancaster in her mind and become simply Jack. Perhaps it was watching him teach Ives how to hold his fork and cut his meat like a gentleman. Or that dazzling kiss. The memory rushed through her in random moments, raising her blood, making her skin tingle like a coming storm.

She'd grasped any reason to push him away, could barely recall now what slender excuse she'd given that they shouldn't indulge in attraction. Yet it hadn't quelled her response to him, and her chest heated with a blush as he watched her. His hand was so strong, as was all of him, solid and firm to the ground. His gray eyes matched the sky. He was a man a woman could lean on, if she dared.

Leda didn't dare lean on anyone. But he clasped her hand firmly, placing his other hand on her elbow as he helped her step down from the cart, and the ache opened wider, deeper.

She could not afford to be daft. She took a deep breath and faced the house.

Atop a low wall to the side of the house lay a line of bricks of assorted colors and sizes. Two had swelled with moisture to the size of loaves. One had split apart. Another looked as if had melted.

One, a pale rectangle, Jack picked up in his hand, and it crumbled back into sand. Another just like it performed the same way.

He sighed. "Wrong again."

"What are you attempting?"

"I'm convinced the soil around here would be good for making bricks. The Romans knew the secret, which is why so many of their ruins survive, but it was lost during the Dark Ages. The Tudors found it again, with the help of Dutch and Flemish settlers. You'll see many of the great houses hereabouts have been redone in the last century. But the recipe is different depending on the soil, and I have not found the knack of it here."

"And these are the experiments you are teased about," Leda observed.

"Once, it would have been my trade. Could I manage it now, it'd be a business that could keep an estate alive, were it in difficulties." He swept his gaze over the house and grounds, still but for the keening wind.

Was his estate in difficulties? Struggling to produce, burdened with debt? Lady Plume had spoken with affection of the graciousness of Holme Hall, and as they entered through the wooden front doors, Leda could see the bones of its former splendor. The domed ceiling of the vestibule dangled an enormous chandelier above the floor, stone inlaid with marble. A wooden staircase led to the floors above, and arched doorways led to state rooms on either side.

The far wall, beyond the staircase, held a tall case clock, a polished occasional table, and a vast oil pointing of a Cavalier knight astride a rearing white charger. Beside it a small, discreet door opened and two women spilled out of a hall Leda guessed led to the service rooms and, she hoped, a water closet.

"Cor blarst me, 'tis himself," one was saying as they bustled forth. "May, stand ahind me and dint you jiffle." The elder pushed the younger at attention before the table, both of them patting aprons and caps into place before the elder bobbed a curtsey, then elbowed the younger to indicate she do the same. "Yer lordship. We hant thought you coming today."

"I had hoped to send warning, but we traveled as fast as the mail," Jack said cordially. "Mrs. Wroth, this is Mrs. Leech, my cook and housekeeper, and May, our maid of all work. I have brought Mrs. Leda Wroth of Bath, lately companion to my Aunt Plume, to arrange a governess for Muriel."

Both women dropped another curtsey. Mrs. Leech rose with a slight shake of the head, as if she were unconvinced of Leda's ability to take on this task. May, too, looked doubtful, but nonetheless offered a polite greeting. "How you goin,' milady?"

Leda struggled to follow the accents. Norfolk speakers moved their vowels back in their throats, unlike the round open sounds of Somerset. "I am very well, thank you."

Jack looked around. "Where is everyone else?"

"Henry went to Thornham to do for his mum, and the misses is out on a wander, sir," Mrs. Leech reported. "They arst if they might, and I dussent keep 'em in to craze us. Where do we put the lady, sir?"

It was a delicate probe as to her status in the household, and Jack didn't realize it. Leda tried to catch his eye, but, bear-like, he blundered straight into the trap.

"I'll have Henry take Mrs. Wroth's things to the mistress's suite, and you may make up a room above for her maid. This is—" He looked, wide-eyed, to Leda.

"Grace Haycot. She came with us from Swindon," Leda said. Grace, craning her chin this way and that to peer into the state rooms, brought herself to attention and made her greetings.

Mrs. Leech looked her over with a sharp eye. "Well, come alonga me and spare the gawping for later, mawther," she said, shooing the two girls down the service hall. "Mind you, there's to be no mardle, no slummockun, and you don't steal a skerrit. May'll larn you how we do, and himself int too finicky, bless 'im, so…" Her instructions, which Leda could comprehend in their gist if not their specifics, faded as the door swung shut.

Jack offered a lopsided smile. "Mrs. Leech runs as tight a ship as Nelson. Tighter, I think, as she gives no quarter, and delegates nothing."

Leda followed him into an inner hall, a spare, lofty chamber. "You needn't give me a fine suite. I would be happy with something next to the nursery, near Muriel."

He blinked, startled. "You are a guest in my home."

"And your servants will conclude I am your mistress." Cool air touched her neck above the collar of her cloak. The fireplace in the corner stood empty and, from its state of cleanliness, had not seen a fire in some time. The room was scarcely used.

Jack flushed as red as the bricks she'd seen outside in his collection of experiments. "We?—"

"Should have anticipated this. Traveling alone, and I am staying here without a chaperone?" To spare his embarrassment, and her own, she looked around at the display of family treasures. There were fewer of them than she might have expected, and not particularly tasteful.

She ought to have foreseen how their arrangement would appear to others, like the innkeeper's wife in Swindon, like his staff. Customarily she was awake on all suits. Seeing Eustace had rattled her wits badly, turned her into a wild creature fleeing for its life.

Being thought Jack's mistress gave her the sudden, unwise urge to become so. He looked so flustered, dragging his fingers along his jaw, coming out again in stubble. It was his gesture when he was nervous, and she knew that about him now.

She knew he snored lightly when he was overtired, that he disliked the taste of eel, that he had once been accidentally shut overnight in the west chapel of Ely Cathedral when he and a school chum snuck in to see the Saxon bones, hundreds of years old. He and his friend had spent the night awake in terror, convinced the bodies of the ancient dead would rise, or their ghosts would haunt them for disturbing their rest.

He set his jaw. "I could contact my Aunt Dinah, I suppose. She lives in Middlesex now."

Of the little Leda had gleaned of Jack's family, he was, aside from his siblings, on corresponding terms with only two members of the greater Burnham family: Lady Plume, who took an interest in everyone and everything, or at least knowing about them, and his aunt Dinah, who as a woman had been left out of the line of inheritance and excluded from most of the family struggles as well.

"Would she come to stay?"

"I could ask. If you are concerned about your reputation."

"I am not concerned on my account." She stepped into the next room, a large formal parlor. She wished she had the right to take his hand, soothe the worry from his face. "I am more concerned how it might reflect upon you and Muriel if my time here causes gossip. Perhaps I ought to stay elsewhere."

He showed her the rest of the rooms on the ground floor, the dining parlor and beyond it the kitchens, a smaller parlor that served as a family sitting room and library. Above, on the first floor, he pointed to the nursery and Muriel's bedchamber, then his own down the hall. Doors opened to a powder room, now unused as Jack wore no wig, and a bathing chamber alongside. The mistress's suite lay at the end of the hall, with windows on all three walls that stared out to sea.

She'd never seen so much water in her life. It looked like it could swallow the world.

Jack spoke from behind her, his voice soft with unguarded longing. "I want you to stay here."

She turned to regard him, standing in the doorway, ever the gentleman. Or at least, the gentleman now. He hadn't been chivalrous when he kissed her in Swindon. He'd been overwhelming, demanding, an inferno of roaring heat. She could close the door behind him and step into his arms, offering herself again. Her breasts tingled at the thought, aching, and a heat roused low in her belly, a restless hunger.

She couldn't give into passion. She couldn't trust herself when she did.

Jack's face changed, tightened. His eyes darkened as he stared at her. Leda's skin prickled. He knew what she was thinking, sensed her desire. He was ready to unleash his. She need only show the smallest invitation and that inferno would roar again to life, all that strength and heat and maleness of him against her, surrounding her. Consuming her.

His face changed. "There's Muriel."

Leda followed his gaze out the window and saw a girl trudging across the lawn. She let herself through a gate in the first wall, stepping into the orchard. Her straw hat bobbed between the trees, and a dark blue skirt flapped about her legs. She looked small and determined.

"I'll meet her downstairs," Jack said. "Will you join us?"

"In a moment." Leda untied the ribbon on her hat and set it on a table, her gaze still fixed on the window as Jack departed down hall toward the stairs.

The sea heaved in gray humps, rippled by the wind, and short grasses along the cliff bent and nodded. A steep path led down to the beach, a wide strip of sand dotted with clumps of rock crowned with green seaweed. Between the field of rocks and the high cliffs, banded with cream and red, lay a broad path of sand untouched by the tide. On it were two sets of footprints, small and distinct.

Muriel must have been walking with her nurse, but where had the maid gone? The girl made her way alone through the inner garden to a door beneath Leda's window, which must lead to the kitchens or a room attached to them. There seemed a dearth of servants for a house this size, only the cook, one chambermaid, and this Henry. If Jack's fame as the Mad Baron had spread to Lynn Regis, or beyond, she didn't doubt his difficulty retaining servants.

Something about the vast sky and the haunting call of the sea made the strange feel possible. Made it seem that a darker, wilder world, one full of ancient things not yet tamed, lay but a step away, across a layer of sand and mist. While inside this house, moaning in answer to the wild wind, lay a still, empty shell encasing a grieving widower and a motherless child.

Little wonder she wanted to put her arms around Jack and hold him close. He didn't seem the Mad Baron to her. He seemed lonely.