Chapter 9

CHAPTER NINE

F rom the corner of her eye, Leda saw Brancaster startle at the term mother. She hadn't known how to prepare him. She could only pray he would not make a fuss.

If he would accede to her wish that he not ask questions, it would mark the first time in her life a man had done so.

Two women bustled out of the cottage, and Leda felt the strangest sense of stepping back in time, of crossing a border that had once seemed unbreachable. She was exposing, to a stranger she barely knew, the three people in the world she had built her entire new identity around protecting.

She shied a glance at Brancaster as she gathered her skirts to step over a muddy spot that Nanny had left by kicking over her milk. He wore the expression she'd seen him wear in the Pump Room when greeting strangers: cordial, correct, reserved.

She held out her free hand. "Will you shake my hand, Ives? I have been eager to meet you for a long time now."

He glanced at the women behind him, seeking permission. "Very well, if it's the done thing." His speech was stilted, and Leda held back a laugh.

His hand was strong, his body well-formed. He looked a boy fed with all the proper food, air, and exercise a boy his age needed to grow. His dark hair was roughly cut, a thick thatch standing out every which way, and Leda wondered if he would develop his father's hawk-like nose. He certainly had his father's eyes, so dark as to appear black, but on Ives, they twinkled with merriment and life.

Forgoing the etiquette that said she should introduce Brancaster first, Leda extended her hand to the other women. The elder, shorter and plump, shook it in both of hers, but the younger, Leda's age, held her palms to her cheeks, shaking her head as her eyes filled with tears.

"Mum—we didn't think—we never knowed—and you're here now, aren't you?"

"I'm sorry I didn't send word. It was quite by accident that we came to Chippenham at all, but once we were here…I hope it is all right to see you?"

"Of course it is!" The elder wiped her hands on her apron and beamed at both of them. "Come in, you and your sprawny."

"We are not courting." Leda's cheeks grew hot. "Milord Brancaster, may I introduce you to my friends? This is Mrs. Blake," she indicated the elder, "and this is Betsey Cowper—Mrs. Cowper, that is." Betsey, gaping at Brancaster, wobbled her head in assent.

"And this is Ives. Or rather, Master Ives…Toplady. My dears, this is the Baron Brancaster of Holme Hall, Norfolk."

The boy executed another bow, his eyes round as eggs. "Gor! A real British lord? In our yard?"

"Heavens, and us with naught but tatties on the table for nuncheon," Mrs. Blake cried. "Well, it's all a huckmuck, but you'd best come in anyway, aye? There's tea, at least, some of the bohea you last sent us. Quite tasty."

Betsey, awed, made her curtsey, and then, as if fearing it was not deep enough for a lord, made another, deeper obeisance. Her head was clearly turned by him, and Leda could not blame her. In his striped coat with its broad lapels and cutaway tails, a pair of buff breeches, and his tall traveling boots, Brancaster cut a fine figure.

For the life of her, Leda could not move to answer Mrs. Blake's invitation.

She had felt that figure curved against her body for the hours of the coach ride that morning.

Then again pressed against her when he carried her in his arms through the water seeping over the causeway.

That figure was burned into her arms, into her skin. When she inhaled, he invaded her nose, citrus and cedar and some rich earthy tone that whispered man .

She had never had a sweetheart, as Mrs. Blake had jokingly called him, but Brancaster was the one man she'd ever met who could overset her, sending her pulse aflutter and her nerves alight.

And he was the only person she had ever let in on her secret. Blood thrummed in her head at her madness. She had led him here blithely, thinking only it would be lovely to see her friends in person, not thinking ahead to the consequences. Not thinking that he could as easily lead someone else here as well, now that he knew.

She tore herself from her frozen state and turned to him. "Mrs. Blake was our cook-housekeeper, and Betsey our maid during my marriage."

Let that be sufficient for the moment. She had told him too much of the state of her marriage, and he had seemed sensitive to her plight. Disturbed by it, even.

"And Master Toplady is your son, Mrs. Wroth?"

The tight set to his lips and his narrowed eyes spoke of his displeasure. He'd guessed at her lie. Would he make a scene about it? Storm away? Reject her offer of assistance and leave her here?

Or would he pin her down and extract the entire painful, sordid, bloody truth?

Somehow, on the basis of no logical evidence, she was certain he could no more easily walk away from her than she, right now, could walk away from him. Some thin but strong filament bound them together. She couldn't explain what had led to such an act of trust on her part as to bring him here, and she couldn't explain why she felt bound to him. But she did.

"Ives is my adopted son," she said in a low voice. "I will explain everything later."

His mouth relaxed a degree. "Will you."

She held his gaze. "Yes." As much as she dared.

"I want tea," Ives proclaimed, "but I s'pose I've to finish with Nanny first."

Brancaster turned to the boy. "I will help you."

Ives stared. "A fancy lord? You'll muddy your boots."

"Mrs. Wroth has already ensured their ruin by traipsing us along Maud Heath's causeway. What's more mud?"

Ives eyed his lordship's footgear, a thoughtful twist to his mouth. "Them's fine boots. A shame, that is."

Brancaster stepped aside to attend to the goat, and Leda followed the other woman into the cottage, pulled by their whispered questions.

"Lady Plume is well. I mean to return to her when this errand is done. Brancaster is her nephew, or grand-nephew, rather. I am going with him to Norfolk to help him arrange a governess for his daughter." Betsey opened her mouth, and Leda squeezed her hand. "We can trust him. I am sure of it."

Betsey closed her mouth. Leda looked around the cottage, humbly furnished, but snug and clean.

"You are comfortable? I worry about you all, tucked away here. So different from what you knew."

"Aye, but it's safe and out of the way, and that's what we wanted." Mrs. Blake patted Leda's hand as she took the butcher's package. The motherly gesture left her with a surprising ache. Leda had not had someone to mother her since she traded the nursery for a governess.

The single room of the cottage held a kitchen on one end, a door leading to a scullery and larder beyond. A sturdy table stood in the middle of the room, with a sideboard against one wall to hold dishes and a spindle and loom opposite. In the second half of the room reposed a pair of upholstered chairs, a smaller chair with a woven seat for Ives, and a bright rag rug thrown over the flagged stones covering the floor.

It was so different from Lady Plume's home in the Crescent, yet something about the place felt more welcoming. More like a home.

"You have what you need?" Leda asked. There were few luxuries or ornaments. A cross hung on one wall, an embroidered sampler on another. Wooden stairs led to the room above, no doubt a shared sleeping chamber.

"We've that and more," Mrs. Blake exclaimed as she unwrapped the package. "Larks, a rare treat! I'll roast them and they'll make a tasty morsel. And a hare civet for dinner, I'm thinking. Betsey, tell that nineter of yours to pick us gooseberries when he's put Nanny away, and I'll make the young scamp and his strapping lordship a stir-in pudding, too. A feast, to celebrate the missus paying us a visit.

"Now, then." She fixed Leda with a stern gaze. "Sit you down and tell us what is afoot. We received your message yesterday to be on our guard."

"I saw Toplady in Bath." Leda sank into a ladderback chair, plucking her gloves from shaking fingers.

Betsey, on her way to the door to call to the boy, whirled with her eyes wide.

"No, not my husband," Leda promised. She squeezed the words past the tight band of her throat. "I am not yet to the point of seeing ghosts, though at first I thought I might have. They are very like, but there is something more sinister about Eustace. If Bertram had had that quality, or I had seen it, I never would have consented to marry him. I would have run away much earlier."

She stared at her hands, splayed on the nicked oaken surface of the table. "None of it might have happened if I had."

"Aye, but it did, and naught's to be done now." Mrs. Blake shook her head.

"And I have my Ives," Betsey said. "Will you have eggs for your pudding, Patience?"

"I'll make a cake if you find a handful, but you might pull some greens for our dinner. The rhubarb's at its best now, and the strawberries just coming on." She winked at Leda. "Mrs. Wroth always did like her strawberries."

"It feels so strange. Calling you Mrs. Wroth," Betsey remarked, handing Leda a basket from a table near the hearth. "With Ives I call you Mrs. Toplady, as you said to."

"I've been Mrs. Wroth so long that I've forgotten I was ever Mrs. Toplady," Leda said. "When I hear the name now, it gives me shivers."

She paused. "Someone at the Angel knew me, or thought he knew me. And I know him, though for the life of me I can't recall how."

She looked back and forth between the two women. Mrs. Blake deftly placed the cooking frame in the hearth, then pulled her roasting pans from a cupboard. Betsey tied the strings of her cloak at her throat, her mouth turning down. It was hard to believe they were all eight years older, and these women so much the same. Only Leda had changed from the inside out.

"If you forget, maybe that's a mercy," Mrs. Blake remarked, her cheeks pinkening as she poked the fire to life.

"But I might also make a mistake," Leda said. "I don't know if Toplady was looking for me, precisely. People come to Bath for the waters and the society. But if he finds me—how long till he finds you? And then what happens? We chose this place because we thought you would be safe. That Ives would be safe."

"And he will be, until he comes of age and can claim his birthright." Mrs. Blake straightened to stare at Leda. "That was always the plan, aye?"

Leda hesitated. Then she nodded and followed Betsey outside.

From outside, the cottage looked so neat, the wattle and daub freshly whitened, the thatch of the roof secure around a gently smoking chimney. A field of corn on one side, a stand of tall trees on the other, with the river and other houses not far away, this small plot of land seemed a corner of Arcadia. Blooming fruit trees behind the house promised a summer's supply of apples, pears, and damsons. Bushes lining a masonry wall along one edge of the garden blossomed with currants and raspberries. A blackthorn tree dangled clutches of tiny sloes.

A pain pierced Leda's chest, as if a spade dug beneath her ribs and turned. What a pleasant thing this was, to step out one's own door into one's garden and orchard. To choose the food that would appear on the table for a dinner shared with family, or the closest thing to family that she had.

Across the yard, Ives led Brancaster on a tour of the hens, introducing each one and explaining her personality and heritage. Brancaster listened, asking serious questions, which Ives answered with authority.

The strange serpent turned and writhed in her breast. Brancaster's attention to the boy so far beneath him in station raised a vein of feeling, sad and sweet together, that she couldn't identify.

And the boy himself. Looking at him tapped a wave of bittersweet regret. There was no doubting his paternity, with the sun gleaming in his black hair and bright eyes. In another version of her life, he might have been Leda's child. She might have had a husband who was kind to her and they raised a child together, tending the land and home that in time they would turn over to him.

"He's a fine boy," Leda murmured.

Betsey answered with a fond smile. "Aye, that he is. Hale and sprack, and never a bellock from him about his chores."

Leda turned to the woman, once a maid in her house, a woman who, for a year and a half, Leda had simply given orders and never bothered to know. "Did we do right? To keep you here? He should be in school."

Betsey moved to the garden and tugged at a clump of purslane. "Where's a school about, mum? The Moravians have a girl's school over at East Tytherton, and there's a Sunday school runs in Chippenham now and again."

"I cannot afford a private tutor, I'm afraid, nor one of the public schools." Leda stripped leaves from the burnet, not yet in flower, and placed them in her basket. "But there is a Free School in Chippenham, and in Gloucester the Crypt School or Sir Thomas Rich's. I've made inquiries."

Betsey glanced at her son as if already anxious to lose him. "I suppose he'll need schooling. If he's to inherit his father's estate."

"If that is what you wish, Betsey. This is your life, and your son."

Panic squeezed Leda's heart in a cold fist. It was her life as well. Her penance. She had crafted a new identity on the model of the woman she wished to be, but she could never walk away from what she'd done. Or the people who'd been hurt by it.

Betsey tore roughly at the tops of beetroot, frowning. "'Tis what it's all for, isn't it? The reason you were to claim him as yours. So he could have what his father would deny him." Her voice shook.

Leda held quiet, letting Betsey compose herself. She'd forgotten, in the clutch of her own nightmares about her marriage, that Betsey had suffered, too.

And she'd known, for the ruse to succeed, she would have to deal with Toplady someday. She'd always known.

"That plan was rather hastily revised, as we know. You came here in a panic, all of you, while I was—well. Let us say, incapacitated. We have time to think now. To do what's best for you all."

Betsey gave a cucumber vine a savage twist, freeing the tender fruit. "I want to do it. I want to die with my son in that house, living grand as a gentleman. His rotter of a father owes him that."

Leda fingered the small pin of a bean, not yet ready to pick. "He ought to have had it from the start, but I never accounted for Eustace. My husband's nephew was very eager to claim his inheritance, wasn't he? And to have me committed to the madhouse." Leda stared at the garden beds, a bright green blur.

Betsey straightened and narrowed her eyes. "Mum. You didn't do what he said. None of us believe that."

" He does. The judge did," Leda whispered. She caught her breath as a new thought struck her. "What if Eustace uses that to challenge our claim? That I am…mad. He always claimed…"

Her throat closed as the old nightmare rose up, darkening her vision. The house in shadow, quiet as death, only the ticking of the case clock as she padded barefoot across the carpet. The blood dripping from her hands, soaked rust-brown into her gown. Nothing alive, nothing moving, save for her and the knife she held.

"Mum. Mrs. Wroth. Caledonia." Leda snapped out of her trance to find Betsey before her, lightly shaking her arms. "Gor, you gave me a turn. Are you poorly?"

"No, just muddled for a moment." Leda gripped the other woman's forearms. "I promise you, I am not out of my mind."

"None of us believed you were, even when you went to that place." Betsey turned to examining peas. "Though how could we blame you, not us that'd seed what you went through. 'Twas a scramble setting up here at first," she added, "but now we muggle along the three of us. Watching Ives grow."

Waiting for the day of reckoning, Leda thought, then realized she'd spoken aloud when Betsey nodded.

"Aye. When that old garley-guts mucker gets his due. And the nephew, too."

Leda laughed at her friend's savage tone and blinked her eyes quickly to clear them. "I shall be proud to visit you both at the Hall when that day comes."

"Nay, mum, you'll live there in splendor too, won't you? As his mother?"

"That is your right, Betsey. I am only his mother to the world; you are his mother in truth. Unless you find some handsome man to set up your own household." She winked.

Betsey loosed a yip of merriment. "Get on, you! We'll all of us live off the lad, like three harpies, vexing him to keep us in style, as merry as the day is long."

Leda nodded, the twinge in her chest pulling again. She wanted that. Lady Plume had softened her, spoiled her, smoothed out the rough, ragged marks that years of despair had left on Leda's soul. She could spend her twilight years in company, in a warm household filled with laughter, ruled not by the whims of a fickle employer but the care of children and one day grandchildren. Not of her own body, but close enough.

She swallowed the lump growing in her throat. "It's been so long since I've been in a garden, Betsey. Do I take the outer leaves of the Silesia lettuce, or pluck it whole?"

"Here, Mother. I picked these for you. Them's gillyflowers."

Leda blinked at the cluster of wildly pink blooms with their feathery petals. Ives watched her with an anxious expression.

"Why, thank you, Master Ives. These are beautiful. You would say ‘They are' gillyflowers, but the thought is lovely nevertheless." She took the bouquet from him with a heartfelt smile. "And how lovely to hear you call me mother." The word felt as strange on her lips as it had sounded on the boy's.

Jack studied them closely, his eyes moving back and forth. Did he see there was no resemblance, no sign Ives bore her blood? Would a magistrate see the same?

"You're to pick the green gooseberries for a pudding, and get them as ripe as you can find," Betsey advised, handing Ives a basket. She faltered when she glanced at Brancaster. "Your lordship may do as he pleases."

Jack took the basket. "I'll hold the basket and you fill it," he suggested to Ives. "Can you believe I've never tasted a gooseberry?"

"Don't eat 'em raw!" Ives advised, leading his new friend to the bushes draping the garden walls and forming a stand beneath the canopy of trees. "They'll taste fine in a pudding. The currants ain't ripe yet, neither."

"Are not ripe yet, either," Jack murmured, and Ives dutifully parroted the correct speech before continuing his lecture on what they might and might not eat.

Leda tried to decipher the look Brancaster flashed her and could not. An English lord, a peer of the realm, the most intriguing man she had ever met, picking gooseberries in a cottage garden. Beside the bastard son of a man dead in his prime, a boy being raised as a pauper in rural Wiltshire.

The bastard child Leda meant to pass off as a gentleman and a gentleman's heir, no matter what it cost her to make the lie real.

Eustace Toplady was looking for him. For her. She knew it in her bones the way she had known, when her parents introduced him as her husband to be, that Bertram Toplady was cruel. And she feared his nephew might be even crueler.

She and Betsey took their gatherings inside to help Mrs. Blake prepare the dinner. Leda laid the table with their best cloth and arranged the gillyflowers in a vase in the center. Betsey passed over the pewter dishes and brought out the tin-glazed earthenware and pewter cutlery for the table, giving the elaborately painted faience plate to Brancaster. "Our one fancy plate," she said proudly. "Le—Mrs. Wroth sent it us a bit ago."

"And thank goodness it wasn't broken in the mail." Leda set the table. "Lady Plume has asked me once or twice who my friends are in Wiltshire, as she knows I lived in Gloucestershire, but thankfully she is not too curious." She flicked a glance at Brancaster, who had come inside with Ives to deliver gooseberries. "One of her many kindnesses to me, I should add."

"Let me help." Brancaster went to the hearth, where Mrs. Blake was wrestling a pan of roast birds in one hand and a stewpot in the other. She gave him a grateful smile as he wrapped his hands in a rag and took the stewpot.

"Your sprawny's a good one, to be sure," Mrs. Blake said to Leda.

Leda laid out the pewter spoons. "He is not my sweetheart."

"That is interesting brick in your hearth," Brancaster remarked. "I haven't seen that red around here."

"'Tis made here in Kellaways, or close about," Mrs. Blake said. "You'll see it in many a kitchen."

Brancaster examined the bricks. "It must be a local stone, different from the limestone. This looks to be a sandstone."

"Kellaways rock, is what we call it, and more than that I can't say," Mrs. Blake replied.

"His lordship likes stones and brick making," Lede explained. "It was a feat getting him here past all the monuments. He wanted to inspect St. Giles."

"Do you, then!" Ives exclaimed. "Would you want to see my snake stones, sir?"

"Milord," Betsey corrected him as the boy scampered up the stairs to the room above. He came down directly with a small wooden box and headed to the table with it.

"Not your dirty old stones on the table we're about to eat from!" his mother scolded. "Take it elsewhere."

Ives dutifully veered to a side table, and while the women laid out the food, Ives showed his lordship his treasures.

"Found 'em near the riverbank," Ives reported. "They's all over. We calls 'em snake stones as for the lines in them. Like snakeskins, see?"

"These are fossils," Brancaster said. "We see them all over Norfolk, too. The going theory is that these are evidence of the Flood. Ancient sea creatures stranded on land when the waters receded, and so trapped in layers of earth."

Leda joined them and was given a whitish stone to inspect, heavy enough to fill her hand. She marveled at the shape printed inside, curled like a snail but with a striated shell. "A fossil?"

"Some small, strange beast wiped out by the deluge," Brancaster said. "Their like no longer exists, not that any living fisherman has found."

"How strange to think the earth was once so much different," Leda said.

"But we can learn about it. The evidence is contained within our rocks. Some buried beneath the earth, and some beneath the sea."

Leda lifted her gaze to his and caught the full impact of his gray eyes, kindled with the light of excitement. He cupped his hands around the stone she held, with one hand tracing the print of the creature, the other cradling her knuckles. His skin was warm.

The air between them disappeared.

"They're not just stones," he said. "They're stories. About the world unseen around us."

"Fascinating," Leda breathed.

"Eat before it gets cold," Mrs. Blake called, breaking Leda's momentary trance.

Their meal was as merry as could be, all of them gathered around the table. Ives, who had never been relegated to the nursery as he would have been in a gentleman's home, joined in the lively discussion about Leda's new life in Bath.

"Many famous people come for the waters," she told the boy. "They call it the Royal Crescent now because Prince Frederick, the Duke of York, stayed there for a time."

"Did the king ever visit?" Ives wanted to know.

"Not that I know of. The king prefers Weymouth for the sea bathing, I believe. But the Duchess of Gordon is in Bath as we speak, and she is a great friend of my employer, Lady Plume."

"And this lady is good to you, aye?" Mrs. Blake asked. "Not setting a gentleman's daughter to making her possets or sorting her embroidery silks."

"I would do those things if she asked me, and many gentleman's daughters have ended in far worse circumstances," Leda replied, heaping her plate with purslane. Fresh greens from the garden were a treat she'd forgotten. If she ever had a home of her own, she would surround it with gardens. "And you are happy here, all of you?"

"Aye, it's a fine place," Mrs. Blake replied. "Kellaways isn't much for a village, but there's Bremhill on one side and Chippenham when we wish a jaunt, and some fine lady in Bath sends us money for all we need. Betsey's earning a bit working at the girl's school for the Moravians, enough to buy her bits and bobs, and our eggs and butter go well at the market. We look after ourselves, and that's more than I can say for you, mum."

"I live in the lap of luxury, I assure you. If I could, I would bring you all to Bath with me."

"I do not see my Aunt Plume as the maternal sort, reigning over a little family," Brancaster observed, his mouth lifting in a wry smile. Leda reminded herself not to look again at his mouth.

"Does she serve you birds?" Ives eyed the two pair of roast larks adorning the adults' plates. "Not even sure how you eat those."

"With one bite, bones and all." Brancaster demonstrated, and Ives grinned at the satisfying crunch.

"I say! I'll get my slingshot and catch you all the songbirds you want, Mrs. Blake. And maybe a hare or two, if I can catch 'em. This civet's a bully good one."

"You ought to thank those who do for you, Ives, but do not say ‘bully,'" Betsey scolded. "You say ‘fine' or ‘splendid.'"

"Or, if you must express yourself in mixed company, ‘cracking,'" Brancaster suggested.

Ives nodded, absorbing this instruction. His lordship's interest apparently set him to a confiding turn of mind. "I needs to learn proper speech and manners," he informed their guest, "because there's a house I am to have, and a grand gent I'll be, but only if I say my name is Toplady, and Miss Leda my mother."

"Mrs. Toplady, and perhaps we should not speak of this," Betsey said, shooting a swift, covert look at Leda.

Leda cut her sliced hare into tiny pieces and considered them while her stomach twisted and hissed. How much dare she confide in Brancaster? How safe was he?

"So Mrs. Wroth has adopted you." Brancaster's tone was even. He took a second tatty, much to Mrs. Blake's delight, and inspected it. Then his eyes lifted to Leda's.

"You know an adopted son cannot inherit property," he said softly. "At least, not if it is entailed. I beg your pardon if the news is unwelcome."

Was he taking her side? Leda couldn't be sure. The purslane bit in her mouth.

"That is why I will say she is my mother to the world. Though this one," and Ives patted Betsey's hand with a fond look, "is the mother of my heart."

Leda put down her fork, an awful thought visiting her for the first time. It was as if the usual paths of her logical mind were trapped with thornbushes and quicksand whenever she came to this subject. She had not thought anything through, not with her usual clarity. Perhaps she had been a touch mad when she conceived this project.

"Do you mind it, Ives? It is a deceit we are asking of you. That I am asking of you."

He was eight, and though Leda had not much experience with children, she recalled her own childhood self being righteously, almost religiously honest. She'd rebelled at falsehoods, even into adulthood. It was why she had fought so hard not to lie and say she wished to marry Bertram Toplady.

How ironic. She's once been so pure, and now look at her.

Ives shared a look with his mother, then Mrs. Blake, that told Leda they'd discussed this topic, many times. "But the fancy gent was my father," he said. "It is for fathers to provide for their sons." Leda heard Betsey's argument in his words.

"And," the boy added, of his own invention, "then I can set up Mum and Mrs. Blake in the fine house, and they can be waited on, not serving, and I think that'd be a bully fine thing, don't you?"

"What they deserve, I agree." Leda picked up her own lark, determined to enjoy it. "And you've only a few more years to wait. Until you can hold your own against any argument."

Ives frowned and turned to Betsey. "Will they still believe she's my mother if she's not Mrs. Toplady too?"

Leda's stomach flopped in the most appalling fashion. She'd changed the name to escape, to be free, to have nothing of her old life following her. She would have to explain all of that to a judge and pray for sympathy.

"The magistrate will believe her, lad, with Mrs. Blake and myself as witnesses. Or the assize judge, if it comes to that." Betsey calmly spooned rhubarb onto the boy's plate with another serving of hare.

Brancaster cleared his throat. "Not to provide more unwelcome news, but an inheritance dispute might be taken to Chancery. If the current possessor of the property disputes the lad's claim."

Leda gazed at him in despair. She'd not thought of that , certainly.

She couldn't afford a suit in Chancery. And what would happen to her little family here if Ives did not inherit? She'd never imagined his claim, backed by her word, would not be accepted.

Would they live out their lives here, if Toplady denied them? And where would Leda go?

Ives set his chin. "I'll make it happen. For Mum. She deserves a fine house and those to do for her. She's drave like a stone carver here, doing for me."

Betsey's cheeks reddened. "Nay, Ives. I was only quanked that day, worn out from the washing. You're not to think I feel that way always."

Brancaster turned to the boy at his elbow. "I have a daughter near your age. But you have two mothers, and she has none."

Ives shook his head. "Now that's a right shame. You ought to find her one."

"He needs a housekeeper as well, for his big house." Leda dabbed her lips, savoring the taste of the roast lard.

Ives' eyes widened. "How big?"

"Have you seen the big house on St. Mary Street, behind St. Andrews Church, near Market Square?" Jack asked.

Ives scrunched his face in thought, then nodded, lighting on the image.

"Much that size."

Ives regarded their visitor with new respect. "That's big."

"Now, imagine that house not on the gentle River Avon, but on a hill, with steep cliffs dropping down to the North Sea."

Ives' expression said he was trying and failed. He had no conception of the sea. "Can you see where the Norsemen came from?"

"On a clear day? No. But if you stare long enough, you can imagine. Did you know I live in the one place in England where you can watch the sun rise over the water and set in the water on the same day?"

Ives narrowed his eyes. Brancaster laid his right hand on the table. "Norfolk sticks out in the sea, like this. And I live here." He pointed to the outside of his index finger. "So from Hunstanton, we look west to what we call The Wash, and east to the North Sea."

Ives shook his head. "I'd fancy that. Living with the sea all around you, and big cliffs, and boats with Norsemen. I've never been beyond Wick Hill."

"Perhaps you can visit someday and meet my daughter. Muriel."

Leda said the name softly to herself. Brancaster was opening up with Ives the way he had not with her, or his aunt.

He seemed easier here in the country, in the open air. In town he'd been stiff and wary as a cat. Here his shoulders relaxed, and his jaw unclenched. She'd spotted him emerging from the garden in just his waistcoat with his shirtsleeves rolled up, and the sight of his bare forearms, with their line of muscle, momentarily robbed her of breath. He was a powerfully built man, but the taming veneer of civilization returned when he slid on and buttoned his coat.

She'd caught his conversation to Ives, explaining that a gentleman never let a lady see him undressed, unless she was his wife. She'd been only marginally composed when he and Ives came inside, Ives carrying the basket of gooseberries as his prize. Even now when Leda looked at him she saw his arms in his shirt, the way the waistcoat drew tight across his shoulders and hugged his lean waist and broad chest.

She looked back at her plate.

"So you grew up there, on the cliffs." Ives sat back with the men while the women cleared the table.

"We've a second course today, like fine folk." Mrs. Blake laid out an array of smoked herring and homemade cheese, then set down a tray of sliced pink meat. "And his lordship's to try the Bath chaps, since Norfolk won't have such things."

"After smelling pork from our companion in the coach from Bath to here," Brancaster said, "I am not sure how much more of it I will want in the next days. But I will try a slice to please Mrs. Wroth."

"Pig cheeks, pickled in brine, then boiled and cooled," Leda told him. "Mrs. Blake adores them, so it's quite fortunate for you she's willing to share."

"It cannot be worse than the raw gooseberry Ives dared me to eat," Brancaster said, accepting the slices the cook heaped on his plate.

Ives giggled. "His lordship's face! Shoulda seen it," he told Leda.

She smiled, warmed by their exchange. So many men of her station didn't have time for those beneath them, children, servants, tradesmen. Brancaster was a different creature, like a lynx of old loosed among British shorthairs.

"I didn't grow up as a baron's heir," Brancaster said to Ives, giving the boy one of his chaps. "Lady Plume had three brothers, and the eldest inherited. The second son had only a daughter, my Aunt Dinah. The baron's son, my uncle, never married, though his sisters all made high matches.

"But the estate is entailed to heirs of the male line, so my many cousins were passed over when the estate came to my grandfather's line. With my father passed away, the title fell upon me. If I die without a son, it will go to the Crown, the male line having died out. I think that is the only reason one of my cousins hasn't seen me tumble off a cliff."

He winced as he said this, as if the words pained, and Leda flashed back to Lady Sydney's revelation about his wife's death.

Fallen…or pushed?

Ives patiently waited for his lordship to try the chaps before he ate his own slice. "Your cousins ain't happy for you? I always thought it'd be jolly to have family."

Leda studied the table. Poor Ives, the lone child. She hoped there were at least other boys living nearby. She herself knew what it was to grow up feeling alone and apart, though she'd had a sister.

"Ah, but I'm a disgrace, you see. My grandfather entered the military, but my father did not. He wanted to support a family properly, so he became a shoemaker. Quite a good one, I might add. The finest folk in Norwich sought him out."

Ives made no attempt to disguise his astonishment. "A shoemaker's son a baron!"

"You see why my cousins despise me and never visit. I fear one or two of my acquaintance in the Smithdon Hundred likewise do not wish to entertain a shoemaker's son in their gracious homes."

Leda's throat pinched. The Mad Baron. He was born a gentleman, but his father had sullied the family name with building a business instead of amusing himself, and living in debt, with gentleman's pursuits. He held the title, but Jack would never be found worthy of it. He could never redeem himself from that pit.

Just like Leda.

Betsey and Mrs. Blake, enjoying their herring, listened attentively. "Who looks after the girl now, milord?"

"Herself, at the moment. Le—Mrs. Wroth is coming to Hunstanton to help me find a governess."

"You could marry Mrs. Wroth, and your girl would have a mother," Ives suggested.

"Not you, too." Leda pursed her lips.

"If you would woo Mrs. Wroth for me, I'd be grateful," Brancaster said to the boy. "She'd make a fine mistress of Holme Hall. Go quite a bit toward establishing my place in the neighborhood, I should think."

Mrs. Blake and Betsey exchanged knowing glances.

"But I believe Mrs. Wroth fancies her freedom," Brancaster went on. He speared a chap and regarded it thoughtfully. "Don't we all?"

"Her more than most," Ives said seriously, "as she was locked up for a time against her will and all. Bad times and bad people, Mum says."

Brancaster stopped chewing and stared at Leda.

In the silence a hen squawked outside, and a songbird swooped across the window. Wind rustled in the oak.

"I was thought mad for a time after my husband's death," Leda said lightly. "We have that in common, milord."

They did not stay for tea, but rather left to take advantage of the daylight. The sun lowered toward the west as they set out over Maud Heath's Causeway, dinner filling their bellies. Brancaster did not ask her questions, for which Leda was grateful. Her heart was as full as her belly. Ives hugged her before she left, and the print of his small body lingered against her heart. Then Brancaster swept her into his arms and carried her across the underwater planks in the river meadow, and a far different warmth curled and teased at her insides.

"Do you suppose a chaise will be waiting?" she asked as they entered the town.

"I hope so. We can set out for Swindon tonight, unless you would rather stay at the Angel. Or find somewhere quieter in Chippenham."

"I would rather not stay in Chippenham."

"Your friends were very welcoming." They paused on the city bridge as a fancy carriage rolled past. "I enjoyed the afternoon," he added.

Leda raised her eyebrows. She ought not provoke him to examine the topic any further. But matters would have to be dealt with eventually.

The sun and wind of the day blushed his forehead and cheeks, and his neckcloth was a wilted knot. He looked rugged from his exertions. Appealing. While the women washed and put away dishes, Brancaster had helped Ives clear the heavier deadfall from the copse and make a tidy stack of firewood. He had done the laborer's task without a murmur of complaint.

She had put the lives and livelihood of her friends in his hands, yet she didn't doubt for a moment that she could trust him. He was as solid and steady as this stone bridge.

"You might guess why I do not speak of them," she murmured. "Not even Lady Plume knows."

"I gather that Ives is Betsey's natural son by your husband." He turned toward the road. His shoulders seemed broader with the gesture. A trace of pollen from the blackthorn tree dusted his coat. "And you mean to convince a court he is your child so he might inherit your husband's estate, as you have no children of your own."

"His father's estate," she said on a sharp exhale.

Fool . She'd been a fool. What gentleman, a lord of the realm who lived by the iron rules of primogeniture—who had won his titles and estates because of them—would allow her this pretense? She had brought in the wolf who would destroy their lair, devour them all, leaving her friends—and her—with nothing.

"Which is currently held by a nephew, I take it."

She bit her lip and nodded, and he went on. "Who also, I deduce, is that man who spooked you when you saw him in Bath."

"He didn't—" She snapped off the lie. Toplady's appearance had terrified her. And Brancaster had seen.

He saw too much.

"I understand why you would disapprove." She curled her fingers into fists, following at his side as they entered the center of town.

He would turn her off, of course. Say her services were no longer required. And then what would she do? Return to Bath and Lady Plume and put herself in Toplady's way? Her whole mad plan, born of desperation, would come tumbling down, and Betsey would be the most hurt by it. And Ives. They'd land exactly in the disgrace and penury she and Mrs. Blake had wanted to protect them from.

They stepped into the hard-packed earth of Market Square, with the square tower of St. Andrews looming, topped with its Gothic spire. Leda never would have looked at the yellow-gray stones of its fa?ade, wondering about their source, if Brancaster had not made her aware of building materials.

"I do not hold the common view on illegitimate children." Brancaster held the heavy front door of the Angel open for her.

"Meaning?"

"I know bastardy is supposed to be a moral stain the child inherits from the mother's lack of continence." He stared straight ahead as they walked through the small foyer. "But I do not see why a child should be held accountable for the sins of its parents. Nor denied a father's care simply because he did not, or could not, marry the girl."

His lips pinched as he delivered this line, and a vein in his neck suggested he clenched his teeth. His views explained why he had been kind to Ives, but not his distemper now.

"Thank you," Leda said softly.

He paused and faced her. The world around them pulled away like rolling bits on a stage. He was not much taller, but he felt so present . The outline of his body, the shape of his face, were burned on her inner eye.

Spending time with him today, seeing him relaxed and at his ease, had been a dangerous seduction. She had no defenses against a man who was good .

"My God." The cry, high and breathless, in a woman's voice, came from behind Brancaster. "Caledonia? We thought you were dead."

Before her stood another ghost, filling the doorway to the private parlor.

Another figure who had been torn from the fabric of her life, stripping Leda of her identity. Another once-loved companion lost to her the moment she came to her senses with the knife in her hand.

"Emilia." The word wisped from Leda on a breath.

Brancaster stiffened, his eyes cautious but his chivalry in place. "Good evening."

"Emilia, this is the Baron Brancaster of Holme Hall." Even stupefied, the courtesies did not desert Leda. They would hold her up while her ship sank beneath her. She searched her mind for her married name. "Brancaster, this is Mrs. Hector Crees of Chippenham. My sister."

Brancaster absorbed this new information quietly. Emilia's eyes burned into Leda.

"I thought Haines was lying when he said he saw you. That he was imagining things."

Age and time had descended harshly on her older sister. Lines framed her brow and pursed mouth. Strands of grey wove among her dark hair, the color of the black walnuts that came from America. She had Leda's nose, Leda's proud chin, and all of Leda's flinty breast.

"Ah. I thought I recognized your man. Shall we have this conversation elsewhere?" Leda motioned toward the dark, wood-framed parlor, currently empty.

Her own calm astonished her. Inside she was a shrieking, keening child. She had looked up to her sister. Admired her. Emilia knew the ways of the world that Leda did not, had early on passed through the gates of womanhood. Her one support, Emilia had been spirited away into marriage just when Leda was beginning to bud herself, and needed her.

"Six years." Her sister's voice shook. The parlor had no fire and the windows turned away from the late afternoon sun, leaving them in gloom. "Six years, with no word to our parents. To our mother. To me. You let us think you dead."

"It was better you thought that." Leda held her fisted hands to her middle, hoping to quiet the roiling sensations there.

"And you never once thought to write—not me, not our parents—to tell us we'd been lied to?"

"Would you have let me live freely? Or would you have made me go back?"

Emilia set her jaw, and Leda had her answer.

"So you are hiding. Because the law, if you were fit to stand trial, would hold you responsible for your crimes. You ran away and assumed a false name, and you are living freely at your ease, while?—

"While what?" Leda broke in. Her heart wept, but her back stiffened. "What have you suffered? In your fine house with your wealthy husband and your children and your drawing room papered in hand-painted prints. Everything you wanted. Everything our parents insisted I must want, too. They would prefer me dead."

She pulled hard at her fingers in their traveling gloves to gain command of herself, so she did not dissolve into tears. "They would have preferred Bertram kill me before I could tell the world what he did."

"It would have spared us the shame," Emilia snapped. "Do you know that shadow follows me around? Even now. I can never lift my head above it. That is Mrs. Crees, they whisper. Do you know the tale?" She swung on Brancaster, her mouth taut with fury. "This is what they say: She is the one with the sister who was locked in the madhouse after she murdered her husband and newborn babe."