The Duchess’s Secret. Elizabeth Beacon
before it snows and we are stranded in this village with him for goodness knows how long until it melts again.’
‘We can’t risk being snowbound out in the open.’
‘Yes, we can; we have to. We must leave this place now he has come here. He cannot be allowed to find out about Jenny; he will take her away from me.’
‘If he’s putting up at the Duck and Feathers it won’t take five minutes for someone to tell him about her. Since he’s sixpence short of a shilling it could take ten for him to work out the lamb is his, but that’s not long enough for us to get out of here before the snow starts.’
‘But once he knows he will take her away from me,’ Rosalind said numbly, wondering if every penny she had could buy Seth Paxton’s neat cob and a light cart. There was the gold watch; it was worth a fair bit and she had often told herself that was why she kept it—to barter when she was desperate and heaven knew she was desperate now.
‘It’s too late if he is already in the village, but are you sure it’s him?’
‘Yes, I met him up on the heath. We spoke.’
‘Then you are well and truly caught and I should have told you about the fat ferret who stayed at the Duck and Feathers and asked a lot of questions a couple of months ago.’
‘You knew an investigator was looking for me?’
‘No, I would have told you if I was sure he was after you, but the ferret asked about half the village. Luckily Seth Paxton and his dad don’t like outcomers who ask too many questions and they didn’t say much.’
‘Yes, and I can imagine why,’ Rosalind said absently, wondering again what the lawyer’s motives were for concealing Jenny’s existence.
Never mind the lawyer now; she had more urgent problems. Jenny was quite small for her age so she might convince Ash she was not his. Why had she told him she had stayed faithful to her marriage vows when they were up on the heath? Idiot, she condemned herself, even as jealousy shot through her again at the thought of the mistresses he must have had since the night he made love to her as if she was the only woman on earth who would ever matter to him.
‘Rogues, the lot of them,’ Joan condemned most of the south coast. ‘But never mind them now. Somebody is sure to tell the Duke about your daughter and there’s no use pretending they won’t.’
‘A fine Job’s comforter you are,’ Rosalind said grumpily. ‘I am going to run across to the Vicarage to fetch Jenny and you can pack a couple of bags and put out the fires so we can leave the moment we get back.’
‘Very well, Miss Ros,’ Joan said with a shrug that said she thought Rosalind was wasting her time, but that she had promised her late mistress she would look after her child as best she could and a promise was a promise.
* * *
Ash approved his neat and spotless bedchamber at the inn. After the neat and spotless landlady went away he had a very necessary wash after his ride through the Dorsetshire hills in midwinter. He shivered in this confoundedly cold climate as he rubbed himself dry and hurried into clean clothes, then went to make sure his horse was being looked after.
‘A fine beast, sir,’ the groom told him and jarred him out of yet another daydream of Rosalind looking breathtakingly beautiful against a blue sky.
‘Aye, I only bought him last week, but he’s already proved a trooper.’
‘Cavalry man, sir?’
‘No, but my brother was.’
‘Ah, a sad business the Great War,’ the groom said with a shake of his head at Ash’s use of the past tense.
‘God send we never suffer the like again,’ he agreed soberly.
Grief made his heart twist every time he thought of Jas dead at the end of that terrible conflict and he wanted to remember his brother with a smile and a See you again one day, big brother salute, instead of this aching gap in his life now he was back in England to feel it even more.
‘I’ll not argue with—Whatever are you three little devils doing up there?’ the middle-aged groom broke off to admonish a pair of unlikely looking cherubs peering down at them from the hayloft and taking in every word.
Ash narrowed his eyes to see exactly who was giggling and shuffling about up there in order to spy on the latest stranger at the inn. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom he picked out what looked like a brother and sister, as both had brownish hair and dark eyes, currently wide with curiosity and apprehension. He was about to grin and reassure them he was not going to give them away, if they could persuade the groom not to either, when the third little demon pushed her way to the front as if she had to know what was going on even if it cost her a scold as well.
He thought seeing Rosalind again was shock enough, but Ash felt his head spin with the sheer impossibility of what his eyes were telling him now. He was looking up into his dead sister’s face. Amanda had looked just so when caught out in mischief—a little bit wary of the consequences underneath, but as bold and uncaring as a baby lioness on the surface. He was mad, then. Or sick. Yes, sick—he didn’t want to be mad. He blinked hard to try to clear his wandering senses. She was still there, looking back at him with puzzled grey eyes so like his own he wondered briefly if his father had strayed around these parts and she was his grandchild, or maybe Jas had left his mark on the world after all?
‘He’s gone ever so pale,’ the older girl whispered as if she was almost as worried about his health as he was.
‘Hard to tell when the sun has turned him so brown,’ her brother said critically.
‘Are you a sailor?’ the girl with his little sister’s face demanded and leaned over her friend’s shoulder to peer down at him more closely.
The truth clicked into place like a perfectly timed mechanism. Not the ghost of his little sister Amanda, or Lord John, or Captain Jasper Hartfield’s by-blow then—she was his child! His daughter. God forgive him, but he wanted to kill Rosalind as soon as that frozen moment of recognition relaxed its grip enough for him to think at all. His wife had kept him in ignorance of this perfect little miracle for seven years. He revised the perfect bit when his imp wrinkled her brow at his silence and gave him a very haughty look, but he still wasn’t letting his wife off the hook for making him a stranger to his own child. Rosalind would have to pay for this somehow. As if anyone could repay him seven and a quarter years of his daughter’s life in this world. He was a rich man now, but the whole of his fortune could not cover that loss, no amount of money ever could.
‘You are very rude not to answer a direct question,’ his imp informed him as if she had been born a queen instead of a pretend Meadows.
‘It ain’t rude to spy on your elders and betters and ask this gentleman a mort of nosy questions, then, Miss Jenny?’ the groom demanded since Ash showed no signs of doing it.
‘He is very brown for a gentleman. Mr Wentmore from the Towers is pale as a ghost and his sister told me only seamen and labourers ruin their complexions out in the sun and wind in all weathers.’
The groom muttered something uncomplimentary about the pale and interesting Mr Wentmore while Ash tried to gather his senses.
‘I only got back to England last week,’ he defended himself, as if his unfashionable suntan mattered a jot. So her name was Jenny, was it? Lady Jenny Hartfield did not have a very stately ring to it, but he liked the name anyway. He badly wanted to tell her what he was to her and she to him. He imagined Rosalind’s version of where her child’s father had got off to and bit back an oath his daughter should never have to hear, especially from him. He could rage at Rosalind later, after he had made it clear she and his child were not going far without him ever again, unless she wanted to relinquish all rights to her child as well as a duchess’s responsibilities. There was no question of a divorce now; he would make sure his child stayed under one of his roofs from now on and whatever plans his wife was making to whisk Jenny away again would be stopped by