“He’ll put in a manager,” warned Emily, but she was tempted all the same.
“A stranger, likely. Who’s to tell him the land’s contested? And what cause would a stranger have to come to killing over it? It’d be back to the courts where it’s been this half century or more.”
Emily smiled. It was close to a grin. It was true that since their neighbor, Casper Sillitoe, had died in September there had been no one to carry on the bloody feud over High Burton Farm, and it was a crying shame to see good pasture standing idle. . . .
“We’ll do it,” she said crisply. “Go back and offer Griswold his price for the flock, Jonas.”
He smiled, showing his crooked, stained teeth, and touched his old-fashioned tricorn. Then he said, “What about you, Miss Emily? You shouldn’t be walking about town all alone. Not this close to hunting.”
“Go on with you,” she said. “It’s eight o’clock in the morning. If there are any bucks and dandies in Melton two weeks before hunting starts, they’re safe in their beds nursing their port-sodden heads. I’ll wait for you at the inn.”
“Right then,” he said, and turned purposefully back to the cross where all the trading was done.
Emily set off for the George Hotel, where they’d left the gig, fretting slightly about her decision. It was the first time she’d made such a purchase without her father’s direct instruction. There would be cash to find to pay for the flock, and these days her father was very tetchy about cash. But Griswold’s sheep were too good an investment to pass up, and High Burton Farm was available . . .
It had been part of the dowry brought by Clara Sillitoe when she married Emily’s grandfather. In those days the families had been close and friendly. Clara, however, though a notable beauty, was frail. She had sickened and died within a year of the marriage. Everyone admitted that old Sir Henry Grantwich had been a poor husband; he’d been neglectful and had openly kept a mistress by whom he eventually had five children. On the other hand it had been clear that Clara was delicate and her family should perhaps have opposed such a marriage.
The grieving Sillitoes had accused Sir Henry of cruelty and neglect and demanded the return of the dowry. Henry bluntly refused. The matter was placed in the hands of the men of law and had remained there ever since—to no one’s satisfaction except the solicitors, who presented their accounts every quarter.
Both the Sillitoes and the Grantwiches, however, were practical country people, and good land could not be let waste. While each maintained their right to the entire property, they had unofficially divided it and used it as pasture through the years.
Until last spring.
The war was to blame, thought Emily. Which put all their problems on Napoleon Bonaparte’s shoulders. Well, they should be wide enough to carry the load.
The war had caused a steep rise in prices, making land-owners rich and some of them greedy. The new and growing popularity of Melton as the center of the hunting fraternity had created a great demand for fodder in an area which was traditionally grazing land. Casper Sillitoe, Clara’s nephew, had decided to put his half of the land to the plow and plant corn. Emily’s father, a new Sir Henry, had objected; it was one thing to let his opponent use the land, another to let him rip it up.
Casper had sent his plow to rip up Two Oak Field. Sir Henry had gone with all the men of the estate at his back to stop them. A pitched battle had resulted in injuries on both sides.
In the end it had come to a duel, man to man, across the weapons of their youth, rapiers. Emily had not been witness to the fight, but her imagination had always boggled at the thought of the two rotund, middle-aged men lunging and parrying on the hummocky grass of Two Oak Field.
It had been farce and had ended as tragedy. Her father had tripped and fallen. Casper had toppled over him, unintentionally driving his sword into his opponent’s back. The wound had not been deep, but it had damaged the spine. Emily’s father had not walked since.
To add to their problems, when word was sent to Emily’s brother, Captain Marcus Grantwich, to come home forthwith and take over the estate, the news came back that the captain was missing in action and feared dead. Which was how Emily came, somewhat reluctantly, to be managing the Grantwich properties.
After the Battle of Two Oaks, as the locals called it, Casper had abandoned his plowing, but in the aftermath no one had dared use the land at all. The mere word of it sent Sir Henry into a paroxysm of rage. Casper had retreated into sullen misanthropy and taken to drink, so that all his affairs slid into chaos.
One night in September, Casper rode out drunk to Two Oak Field. He set his horse at the fence there, fell, and broke his neck. Sir Henry said good riddance and that he wished he’d been granted such a clean death; some in the area put it down to guilty conscience or even the hand of God; most just reckoned it to be bad luck and wondered who’d inherit from the old bachelor.
Emily was jerked out of her thoughts by a warning shout. She stepped quickly back to clear the way for a brawny man carrying an amazing quantity of bricks in a hod. He nodded his thanks as he raced towards a new house rising up where lately there had been a market garden. A cart full of the bricks stood in the road waiting to be unloaded. There was so much new building now that Melton had become the Queen of the Shires. After all, the town had become the mecca for the hunting fraternity.
Foxhunting had slowly been growing in popularity over the past fifty years or so, but it was only since the turn of the century that the addicts of hunting had realized the unique advantage offered by Melton Mowbray.
There were three hunts which every man of the chase wished to follow—Hugo Meynell’s famous Quorn, the Duke of Rutland’s Belvoir pack and the Earl of Lonsdale’s Cottesmore. Melton sat plump in the middle of them all. Each pack of hounds was out only a couple of days a week, but with a base in Melton a man could reach all three and so, with luck, follow the hounds six days a week throughout the season.
Hunter’s paradise.
The people of the area were renting out every available room and new buildings, like this one, were springing up all over town. Emily shook her head and moved on. She did not entirely approve of all the changes. It was true that hunting mania had brought prosperity, but she remembered nostalgically the sleepy town of her childhood. Now it was scarce safe to walk the streets in the high of the hunting season when the town was packed with wild young bucks ripe for trouble, on or off the field.
But it was still a pleasant place, especially on such a beautiful October morning, mellow after a soft overnight rain. Many trees still held their leaf, shining in the sunlight, bronze, copper, and gold. Late roses bloomed in a nearby garden and a squirrel scurried by with an acorn in its mouth.
Emily loved the cycle of the seasons, but these days they seemed to pass so fast. She was twenty-six years old. Firmly on the shelf and virtually past her last prayers. For a long time she had not minded being the quiet daughter, the plain one, the one who would stay home and look after her father. She had certainly not envied her pretty younger sister when Anne had married Sir Hubert Keynes. Sir Hubert was a pompous young fool, and Emily wondered how Anne could tolerate him for two minutes.
These days, however, she was aware of a restless dissatisfaction, though she was not at all sure what she desired. Certainly not another Sir Hubert. Nor could she contemplate a change in her life so long as her father needed her to run the estate.
In fact, she told herself sternly, she had better apply her mind to business instead of whimsical fantasies. She opened her record book as she walked on, reviewing the purchases and sales made at the market and checking the list of supplies she had to order before returning home.
The heels of her mother’s old-fashioned half-boots clipped smartly on the cobbles with each step. At only five foot two, Emily felt she needed every advantage when she went to the cattle market, but the heels on the boots made her footing precarious on the wet cobbles and she kept half an eye on the road before her.
There were people about, but only servants running errands or making deliveries and country people going to and from market loaded with purchases. As she turned into the more fashionable streets even these became fewer. As she had predicted, what society people were in town were fast in their beds.
She was pondering whether to buy some of the first crop of Seville oranges, which were expensive as yet but which would make wonderful marmalade, when a shriek made her look up. In one of the new narrow houses, a window had been pushed open and it was from there the shriek had come. A tall man came out of the house and stood looking up. Before Emily could prevent it he took a few steps backwards and collided with her.
Her reticule and book went flying, and Emily herself was knocked off balance. With the agility of a cat the man twisted and grasped her in strong hands as she teetered. There was an ominous crack from the heel of her boot.
Stunned, Emily looked up at the most handsome face she had ever seen. Lean. Unfashionably brown. Royal blue eyes shining with hilarity. Crisp glossy dark curls under a fashionably tilted beaver.
“I’m terribly sorry,” he said, obviously struggling with outright laughter. “I—”
A china bowl flew past them and shattered on the cobbles. “Be damned to you, Piers Verderan!” The shriek rent the air. “Go to hell, where you belong!”
Emily gaped up over his shoulder to see a red-faced woman leaning out of the upper window with most of her body hanging out of a loose silk wrap. Tousled Titian curls massed around what had obviously been intended by God to be a pretty face.
The man began to turn, his hands still on Emily’s arms. The woman reached behind her and threw. A beribboned oval box sailed through the air to knock his hat flying. The box burst open, and a pungent cloud of violet-scented powder billowed out over both of them. The woman shrieked with laughter.
The man choked and let Emily go. He stooped, ripped up a tall weed complete with muddy roots, and hurled it with deadly accuracy at his attacker. She was still laughing as it hit. She stopped and opened her mouth to start another blistering tirade, but after an alarmed look at the gentleman she shut her mouth, retreated, and slammed the window shut.
Stunned, coughing, and waving away the pungent powder, Emily still had to admire such ability to silence a harridan. When the man turned back to her his face was smoothly expressionless. He coughed again, brushed a volume of powder out of his dark curls, grimaced slightly, shook himself, and then turned his attention to Emily.
Her large plain straw bonnet had caught most of the deluge, and he deftly removed it and beat the powder off downwind. Dazedly shaking her serviceable dark pelisse, Emily felt as if she’d stepped into a violet-scented hurricane. Her bewilderment increased when an elf popped out of the half-open door of the house.
A delicate creature, shorter even than Emily, with a mass of silver-blonde curls and huge blue eyes, the elf was dressed only in a filmy knee-length smock and showed a great deal of slender, shapely leg.
The elf and Emily stared at each other blankly, and then it disappeared. Emily blinked. The tall gentleman spoke as he came to stand in front of her.
“As I was saying,” he drawled as he settled the bonnet back on her head and deftly retied the ribbons, “before we were so rudely interrupted, I beg your pardon.” He brushed at his sleeve and then shrugged and desisted. “I think that does more harm than good.” He looked down at her, and a touch of sardonic amusement lightened his features. “We’ll just have to bring powder back into fashion, won’t we?”
Torn between annoyance and unwilling amusement, Emily shook out her skirts and said, “Hair powder, perhaps, if you can afford the tax, but body powder?” After a moment she realized what she had said and went red. When she looked to see his reaction, however, he was picking up his hat and her reticule and book, and paying no attention to her words at all.
Arrogant, she thought. Abominably arrogant. A typical London buck come to lord it in Melton and chase foxes—a Meltonian.
He returned her possessions to her. “Perhaps I may make amends by escorting you to your destination, ma’am.”
One embarrassment subsided only to be replaced by another. It was finally dawning on Emily just what kind of scene she had interrupted. On top of that it couldn’t be clearer that he had no enthusiasm for being in her company.
“No, thank you,” she said as coldly as possible. They both reeked of violets to a cloying degree, and she maliciously hoped it would embarrass him even more than it would embarrass her.
Even her coldness left him unruffled. “As you wish,” he drawled. He produced a card. “I’m Piers Verderan, as you may have heard. Staying at the Old Club. If your clothes prove to be unreclaimable, apply to me for recompense.”
“Thank you, but that will be unnecessary,” Emily said frostily, annoyed at being taken for an upper servant though she deliberately dressed very plainly for these trips. She turned to make a dignified withdrawal and almost fell as the heel of her boot snapped off.
Again he gripped her arm, though he released her as soon as she got her balance. He bent and retrieved her heel from where it was wedged between two cobblestones. He looked down with interest at her footwear and raised one elegant dark brow.
“Quaint,” he remarked, and Emily’s lips tightened. “If you care to raise your foot like a horse, ma’am, I’ll see if I can fix it, but I doubt it will work.”
“I don’t have far to go, sir,” Emily said, and held out her hand for the heel. “I will manage, I think.”
He placed the wooden heel into her hand. “My dear lady,” he remarked with an edge to his voice and an air of excruciating boredom, “I don’t bite, and I only abduct women if I find them wandering on deserted moors at full moon. You will be much more comfortable if I lend you my arm as you hobble to your destination.”