The Silver Lord. Miranda Jarrett

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СКАЧАТЬ and the white plaster and the diamond-paned windows were there, true, but there was no sign of the gracious old oaks or the rosebushes, and the drive was neither curving nor welcoming, but scarcely more than another rutted path to the door.

      “Here we be, M’Lord Cap’n,” said the driver as he opened the carriage door for George. His face was ruddy from the cold, his breath coming in white puffs, as he kept a suspicious eye on the scruffy boy who’d appeared to hold the horses. “Feversham Hall, M’Lord Cap’n.”

      George nodded, too intent on studying the house itself to venture more. The old timbers were splitting and silvered, the plaster needed patching, last summer’s weeds still dangled from the eaves, and nothing seemed to be parallel to anything else. Even that wretched boy with the horses would have to be taught to comb his hair and stand properly. If he took the house, he’d have plenty of work ahead to make it shipshape and Bristol-fashion. He’d have to bring in his own people up from the Nimble to see that things were done right, beginning with filling in the ditches in that hideous excuse for a road.

      He nodded again, allowing himself a wry smile of determined anticipation with it. A right challenge this would be, wouldn’t it? If Addington and his blasted treaty had put the French out of his reach, at least for now, why not direct his energies and those of his idle crewmen towards replacing rotting timbers and split shingles? Perhaps “attack” had been the right word after all.

      Purposefully he climbed the stone steps to thump his knuckles on the front door. The agent in London was supposed to have sent word about George’s arrival to the caretaker who lived in the house—a caretaker who was not only negligent in his duties, but dawdled at answering the door, decided George impatiently as he counted off the seconds he waited. If he took the house, one of his first tasks would be to send this worthless fellow packing.

      George knocked again, harder. Where in blazes was the rascal, anyway?

      He heard a scurry of footsteps inside, the clank and scrape of the lock being unbolted, and at last the heavy old door swung open on groaning iron hinges that needed as much attention as everything else. That much George had expected.

      But he’d never anticipated the woman now standing before him.

      She was tall, nearly as tall as George was himself, and even the simply cut dark gown that she wore with the white kerchief around her throat couldn’t hide that she was a handsomely made woman, one that would draw his eye anywhere. Just enough thick, dark hair showed beneath her cap to emphasise the whiteness of her skin, and her mouth had the kind of rich fullness that lonely sailors dream of. She seemed as if she’d been fashioned with the same contradictions as the landscape around her, dramatic and unyielding, beautiful yet severe, with thick-lashed eyes the mysterious smokey-gray of the mist that rose from Romney Marsh.

      Yet though she wasn’t some giddy maidservant ripe for dalliance—she was too self-possessed for that—she wasn’t a lady, either, not answering her own door. The housekeeper, then, to stand with such authority. She was most definitely a different kind of beauty from the dithering, highborn London ladies he’d spend the last fortnight with, women so overbred and insubstantial in their white muslin gowns that a good west wind would have blown them away. But not this one, not at all, and George caught himself studying her with considerably more interest than he should.

      “Good day, sir,” she said. The clipped words sounded more like a warning than a greeting, nor did she step to one side to invite him to enter. “We have been expecting you, Captain Claremont.”

      “Captain Lord Claremont,” he corrected, his smile intended not to soften his words, but to show he meant them. “If you have been expecting my arrival, then you should know how to address me properly. ‘Good day, Captain My Lord’, not ‘sir.”’

      Her eyes might have narrowed—he couldn’t be certain from the way the shadows fell across her face—but she most definitely did not smile.

      “As you wish,” she said, pointedly omitting any title at all as she finally stepped aside and held back the door.

      He walked past her, tucking his hat beneath his arm. As his eyes adjusted from the gray light outside, he could see that the interior of the house was in much the same state as the outside. Everything was well-ordered, scrubbed and swept, clean and in its place, but the cushions on the chairs were threadbare and the walls needed paint, the sorts of shabbiness that came from a lack of money, not inclination.

      “Mr. Winslow is to show me the house,” he said as he ran his hand lightly along the carved oak leaves on the newel post. “Please summon him directly.”

      “Mr. Winslow isn’t here,” she answered, so quickly that he was sure she’d been anticipating the question. “He is—he is away at present.”

      “Is he indeed?” George was surprised; he knew the agent had been quite specific about his visit since there’d been so few inquiries about the house.

      “Indeed, he is.” She flushed as she noticed his gaze shift to her clasped hands, looking for a wedding ring. “Mr. Winslow is my father, not my husband. I can show you the house every bit as well as he.”

      He held his hat before him and bowed, just from the waist, and smiled. She deserved that from him. It wasn’t any of his business whether she had a husband or not. Still, for some reason he was glad she wasn’t married to the ne’er-do-well caretaker, but instead merely burdened with the rascal as her father. “Then show away, Miss Winslow. Show away!”

      She didn’t smile in return the way he’d hoped, though the flush remained in her cheeks. “You will not like the house.”

      He frowned. “Why are you so certain?”

      “Because none of you fine London-folk do.”

      “Then it is a good thing I am neither from London, nor what you would deem ‘fine’, being a sailor,” he said, wondering why the devil she seemed so determined to warn him away. “You are not quite as knowledgeable as you believe yourself to be, Miss Winslow.”

      “Nor am I quite so ignorant as it pleases you to think,” she said. “Even here in Kent, we have heard of the ‘Silver Lord’. Rich as the king himself, they say you are now, and all from plundering that Spanish treasure ship.”

      “‘They’ do not always tell the truth, Miss Winslow.” He should have realized his new fame would have preceded him, even to this remote place, and he doubted he’d ever grow accustomed to that hideous soubriquet that his own brother Brant had concocted. But unlike the greedy admiration and interest his good fortune had brought him in London, this woman seemed disdainful, her gaze patently unimpressed as it swept over his uniform.

      “Now shall you show me this house, Miss Winslow,” he asked, “or will you leave me to find my own way?”

      He couldn’t tell if she sighed with resignation, or irritation, or simply took a deep breath as she turned towards the first room to the left of the hall.

      “The oldest part of Feversham Hall was built in 1445 by Sir William Everhart,” she began, lecturing like a governess with her hands folded before her at her waist. “It was supposed to be called Rose Hall, but the Feversham stuck instead because of the fevers and miasmas that rose each summer from the marshes. They say from fear of fevers, Sir William wouldn’t come down from London until he’d been assured of a killing frost.”

      “I can understand the old gentleman’s reluctance,” said George as he followed. “I saw what yellow-jack could do to СКАЧАТЬ