The Silver Lord. Miranda Jarrett

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СКАЧАТЬ asked the most foolish question in the world. “I have always lived near the marshes, and I cannot imagine living anywhere else. Besides, it’s only the outsiders that are stricken with the fevers. We folk that live here always are never touched.”

      “So if I were to make this my home,” he asked, “then I should never be touched either?”

      “Shifting your home to here would make no difference at all,” she answered firmly. “Not even you can have whatever you wish to buy. At Feversham, you would always—always—be an outsider. Now here, this is the front parlor.”

      He frowned, tapping his thumbs along the brim of the hat in his hands. He was accustomed to being obeyed by his crewmen and most everyone else he encountered in his life, and he certainly hadn’t been corrected with such directness by a woman since he’d left the nursery.

      The same woman who’d just turned her back to him—to him!—and was now walking briskly away as if he were nothing more than that lowly stable-boy.

      “Miss Winslow,” he said, his voice automatically marshalling the authority of the Nimble’s quarterdeck. “Miss Winslow. Have you forgotten that I have come here solely to inspect this house for the purpose of making it my own?”

      Slowly she turned, her hands still clasped before her, and gazed at him over her shoulder with unsettling evenness, almost as if they were equals.

      “I have forgotten neither your purpose nor mine, no,” she said, her head tipped to one side so the pale light slipped across the curve of her cheek. “You are here to see Feversham, just as I am here to show it.”

      He let out his breath slowly, unaware until that moment that he’d been holding it. “I am glad you have recalled your duty, Miss Winslow.”

      “Yes, Captain My Lord.” She turned her head another fraction to the left as she dipped a quick curtsey of unconvincing contrition. “I recall everything. My duty, and my miserable low station before my betters. I shall not forget either again, Captain My Lord.”

      Before he could reply she’d swept into the next room, tugging aside the heavy curtains at the windows. Weak sunlight, swirling with motes, filtered through the tiny, diamond-shaped panes and drifted over furniture shrouded in white cloths like so many ghosts. Miss Winslow didn’t glide through the parlor like London ladies, but went striding across the patterned floor so purposefully that her black skirts flurried and fluttered around her ankles in white-thread stockings.

      But the skirts and the ankles were the least of it. Why in blazes did he have the distinct impression that by agreeing with him as she had, she’d still somehow bested him?

      “There are sixteen chairs made of the same Weald oak to match the panelling,” she announced, twitching aside a dropcloth to display the tall-backed armchair beneath it. “It is considered most rare to have the complete set like this.”

      Most rare the chairs might be, but George was in no humor to appreciate it. “That chair is a right ugly piece of work, Miss Winslow,” he said testily, “whether it has fifteen brothers or a hundred, and I’d wager it’s barbarously uncomfortable in the bargain.”

      “That is your judgment, My Lord.” A fresh spark of challenge lit Miss Winslow’s gray eyes as she flipped the cover back over the offending chair. “The last master, Mr. Trelawney, appreciated the old ways in his home.”

      “Or perhaps,” said George, “Mr. Trelawney was simply too tightfisted to make the necessary renovations to bring the old ways up to snuff with the new.”

      “And what if he was, Captain My Lord, or what if he wasn’t?” she demanded tartly. “It’s been four years since Mr. Trelawney died, and nothing has been changed in that time. I told you the house wouldn’t suit you.”

      George raised a single brow. “I haven’t said that it didn’t, have I?”

      “You’ve as much as said it, saying everything’s gone fusty and shabby,” she said, her voice warming. “The other Trelawneys up north aren’t about to keep up with London fashions and improvements when what’s here will serve well enough. Times are hard, what with the wars and all, and the Trelawneys aren’t the sort to go tossing good coins after bad for no reason.”

      “But what a wonderfully fine thing their carelessness is for me, Miss Winslow,” countered George, “especially if the shabbiness of the ‘old ways’ lowers Feversham’s asking price.”

      She dipped her chin, letting the words simmer and stew between them. Too late she’d realized he’d been teasing her, and clearly the knowledge hadn’t made her happy with him, or herself, either.

      “Through these doors lies the dining room,” she said curtly, turning with an abrupt squeak of her heel to lead the way.

      George followed, keeping his little smile to himself. He’d won this particular skirmish handily, and he suspected there’d be more to come before they were done. Clearly Miss Winslow hated losing just as much as he did—which was making this tour a great deal more interesting than the old-fashioned furniture and creaking steps.

      Their truce lasted through the tour of the dining room, the drawing room, and another dark little parlor pretending to be a library, though the shelves appeared to hold not books, but a mouldering collection of badly preserved stuffed gamebirds. The same uneasy peace held between them as they went downstairs and through the empty servants’ hall, past the laundry and the dairy and the echoing catacombs of the pantry, scullery, and kitchen, where George decided there was nothing more desultory than a kitchen bereft of the bullying chatter of a cook and the savory fragrances of roasting and baking, or sadder to see than a cold, clean-swept hearth with a row of empty spits above it.

      How in blazes did Miss Winslow live in the middle of this? Surely she couldn’t be spending night and day alone among these shrouded chairs and mouldering walls, not and keep that straight defiance in her back and the sharp spark in her eyes. Surely there must be some other small, snug cottage on the land where she and her old father lived, some other place that was home.

      But if that were so, then why did she still have so much pride in the old hall, shabby as it was? And why, when he had the power to restore it, did she seem so resentful of such a possibility? Why was she so intent on chasing him away?

      And why, really, did he care?

      “This is the mistress’s bedchamber,” she was saying as she threw open the shutters of the next-to-last room upstairs. “It has not been used in a long time, Mr. Trelawney being a bachelor-gentleman.”

      “But doubtless at least one visiting queen or another has slept here,” said George, gazing at the enormous canopy bed, the heavily carved posts and the faded white and gold brocade hangings still maintaining a rare, regal grandeur. “Isn’t that always the case with the grand beds in these old houses?”

      “No,” she said quickly. “Not here, not at Feversham. No lady’s ever slept in that bed that hadn’t a wedded right to it.”

      Unable to resist such an opening, he patted the bed’s faded coverlet. “You’ve not been tempted to try it yourself, Miss Winslow? Not once, for a lark, to see how the mistress slumbered?”

      Fiercely she shook her head, even as she blushed. Ah, he thought, so she had tried the bed, no matter how severe and proper she aspired to be. What woman wouldn’t, really, when tempted with a bedstead fit for a queen?

      Or СКАЧАТЬ