A Stranger's Secret Read online

  “As if I could.”

  She would be writing letters from Bastion Point, asking a few more gentlemen of means in Cornwall if they would consider investing in the Penmara mines. If only she could afford to hire a mine engineer to inspect them and estimate how much ore might be there below the floodwater. The miners, now out of work because the engines stopped pumping out the water years ago and no money remained for repairs, claimed that the mines held wealth in copper and tin.

  She didn’t want the tin. It had to be inspected and stamped with a government seal. This cut into profits. But copper—in Cornwall, copper was gold, especially with two wars raging. The navy needed copper to coat the bottoms of their ships.

  She picked up the tray and Nicca sprang forward to open the door. As he was about to pull it closed behind her, no doubt anxious for his own cup of midmorning tea, she turned back to ask, “Why are the dogs with Mr. Chastain?”

  “He asked for them. Said he owed them or sommit of the like.”

  “And so he does.” Morwenna headed up the back staircase balancing the tray with care, then halted so abruptly halfway up that she slopped tea over the rims of the cups.

  She hadn’t told Chastain about the dogs finding him, nor how they looked over him. She doubted either Nicca or Henwyn—especially not Henwyn—had said anything to him.

  As fast as she dared with the teacups, Morwenna sped up the steps and balanced the tray on one hip while she knocked on his door. A scrabble of paws and a yip or two of greeting preceded a slow, steady tread across the floor. Then the door opened and Mr. David Chastain stood in the opening.

  Morwenna caught her breath. By daylight, he looked even better than he had in the flickering glow of candles the previous afternoon. Her grandfather’s sober garb suited Chastain’s looks, emphasizing the glossiness of his dark hair, the hints of copper and cinnamon amidst the coffee-brown strands, and making the green lights in his eyes a little brighter than the gray. He towered over her, her head perhaps reaching the center of his chest, and he was broad, far broader than her husband had been. Truth be told, he was better looking than Conan, and the smile he gave her—

  She swallowed against a dry throat, pushed down a sense of guilt for looking upon another man with favor. “Tea,” was all she managed.

  Oggy and Pastie sat beyond Chastain, their tails wagging as though they expected cups of tea as well.

  “The tea is welcome.” His voice, that hint of Somerset, broke the spell.

  Fine feathers did not make a fine bird.

  She thrust the tray into his hands, then snatched up her cup. “I need to pack my things. We leave in a quarter hour.” She spun away, sloshing hot tea onto her fingers.

  “My lady—”

  She ignored him and traversed the hall to her chamber. Not until she heard doggy toenails on the floor behind her did she remember she had intended to ask Chastain how he knew he owed the dogs something. Too late now. She could scarcely return.

  When she turned around, though, she saw him standing in the doorway still watching her.

  She ducked into her chamber, the dogs with her. Once her door closed behind her, she sank to her knees and hugged both hounds, Conan’s beloved hounds. “How could I do that? How could I compare him to Conan and find my husband wanting?”

  Conan wasn’t wanting. He had been kind, loving, and as honest as a man engaged in illegal activities dare be. He had been completely open with her. She knew of his hopes and dreams, how he wanted to marry off his sister for her sake and reopen the mines for the sakes of the villagers barely managing to survive. He wanted to restore the house and fill it with a dozen children. He wanted to take his seat in Parliament and carry her off to London to dress her in fine silks and jewels . . .

  Pastie squirmed out of Morwenna’s hold and trotted across the room to inspect a dress that had slid from the pile on the bed to the floor. Oggy remained and licked Morwenna’s face where some tears ran.

  “I should stay here away from him.” She released Oggy and rose. “You cannot lie on that dress. It’s the best one I own.”

  She wore it to church and Grandmother frowned at it every Sunday, then reminded Morwenna of Miss Pross’s skill with a needle and how Elizabeth had left behind an entire room full of gowns.

  Because she had purchased new ones for her new life.

  Morwenna snatched up the gown and began to fold it while talking to the dogs. “I can’t take you with me, but Nicca will bring you over to visit.” She set the dress into the small leather trunk Nicca had found somewhere in the attics. “You’ll be all right here without me?”

  Their big dark eyes gazed at her with sorrow.

  “Don’t do that. I feel guilty leaving Penmara as it is. But this is for Penmara’s sake.”

  They sighed and slumped to the floor.

  “Mr. Chastain remembers more than he is saying, and I must find out what it is for all our sakes. You do understand—”

  Carriage wheels sounded on the drive, and the dogs sprang toward the window, barking.

  “Quiet.” Morwenna shoved the last two gowns into the trunk and slammed the lid.

  The dogs stood on their hind legs, paws on the sill, and whined with their noses against the glass. Mist formed where their breath fanned across the panes. That wouldn’t happen at Bastion Point. No occupied room would dare get so cold.

  Morwenna buckled one of the straps on the trunk and picked up the second just as Nicca knocked on the door. Distracted from the carriage outside, the dogs charged for the portal and the distraction inside.

  “Sit,” Morwenna commanded.

  The dogs sat, wagging and quivering as they had when guarding David Chastain on the beach while she ran for help.

  While she was gone . . .

  Something else niggled at her mind, some point she was missing, something important.

  The knock sounded again, interrupting her concentration on the missing memory piece.

  “Come in,” Morwenna called.

  Nicca opened the door. “I’ll get that for you, m’lady.” He patted each hound as he passed. “This be aught you have?”

  “And Mihal’s things.” Morwenna nodded toward the makeshift nursery.

  She knew she should call him by his title, or at the least Master Mihal, but that was so much to hang upon the fragile neck of a baby not yet two years old. She wasn’t formal to her two servants. Her grandparents would insist on it, though.

  “Penvenan,” she corrected herself for practice.

  Nicca shouldered her trunk, then headed over to the other one she had packed for Mihal. When he picked it up to balance on his other shoulder, the dogs took on worried expressions and slunk over to Morwenna, tails drooping.

  “Nicca will take good care of you.” She hugged each of them. “Be good.”

  She left the room, the dogs trailing behind, and found David Chastain in his doorway with two footmen from Bastion Point.

  “But Sir Petrok said we must carry you, sir,” one of the footmen was saying. “It’s not worth our jobs to not do so.”

  “I think carrying me—” David broke off and shot Morwenna a pleading glance over the footmen’s heads. “My lady, do please tell them I can walk to the carriage.”

  She wasn’t certain he could. He stood upright, but one hand braced against the door frame. A close inspection showed the slightest tremor in his forearm, and his face was too pale for good health. Worse, a sheen of perspiration beaded across his brow just below the hairline.

  But she understood the man’s need for dignity and addressed the footmen. “If he wants to walk, let him walk. Just be prepared to catch him if he tumbles face-first down the steps.”

  David shot her a grateful glance. “I won’t go tumbling down the steps.”

  The two footmen stalked ahead, their faces set. Morwenna followed, one dog on either side of her. Nicca took the back steps with the trunks. He would take them around the side of the house, and Henwyn would meet them in the front with Mihal. Even without
the servants and baby, they made a strange cavalcade. Morwenna tried to get the dogs to stay in the house for fear they would follow the carriage, but, for once, they ignored her command and stuck to her as though glued to her skirts. Ahead of them, David Chastain descended one tread at a time, a hand on either railing. His hands gripped those railings with white-knuckled tension, and his movements were stiff. More than once, he emitted a grunt as though he stepped too hard and jarred his battered body. Each time, one of the footmen shot him a “We told you so” look. They made it safely to the entry hall. One footman sprang forward to open the front door. Only two more steps and a dozen feet to the carriage remained. David managed those well enough, but lifting his foot for the first high step into the vehicle defeated him. Twice his shoe slipped off the tread. The third time, he slumped against the side of the carriage and might have slid to the ground if Morwenna hadn’t sprung forward and wrapped her arms around him.

  “Pride goeth before a fall,” he murmured.

  “And we’re both going to fall.” Morwenna swayed beneath his weight. “John. Joseph.” They were laughing, with their faces red from trying not to do so aloud, but stepped forward to help.

  And Oggy leaped between them. He didn’t growl or bare his teeth. A dog his size didn’t need to, especially not when Pastie joined him.

  “Oggy, Pastie, sit.” Morwenna dared not release David to pull the dogs away, but she was growing flushed with mortification for standing in front of her grandparents’ servants with her arms around a near stranger and his arm around her shoulders. It was just too intimate, whatever the reason.

  “Oggy.” She heard the strain in her voice, then when the dogs continued to ignore her, she made herself look up at David.

  His face was too close to hers, close enough for her to catch green sparks in the sea storm of his eyes. Green sparks because he, too, was laughing and trying to keep it inside.

  “I should let go of you.” She spoke through gritted teeth. “But I spent too many hours nursing you to let it all go for naught because of my pride.”

  “I beg your pardon, my lady.” He cleared his throat. “I’ve thought up better ways to get a lady’s arms around me than risking cracking my head on the side of a carriage.”

  “If you’ve had to think up ways, then they aren’t initially willing.”

  Which was probably untrue. Before Conan, she would have been more than willing to put her arms around a man who looked like David Chastain. Her cheeks heating, she returned her attention to the footmen still held at bay. “Go fetch Nicca. The dogs will listen to him.”

  As though the hounds were nipping at their heels, the footmen sprinted around the side of the house. The instant they were out of sight, the dogs began to wag their tails and rushed over to lick David’s hand.

  “What’s wrong with you beasts?” He grasped Pastie’s collar, then moved his arm from around Morwenna’s shoulders and bent enough to rest his other hand on Oggy’s back. “You can release me now, my lady, not that I minded in the least. I just think maybe you’d prefer some privacy.”

  “Some pri—you were about to—” Morwenna caught a faint snicker and glanced up to find the coachman leaning down to watch from the safety of the box. She released her hold on David and backed away so fast she caught her heel in the hem of her gown. The arrival of Nicca with the footmen and Henwyn with Mihal drowned out the ripping of Morwenna’s hem, but she felt the stitches go. “You’d better be worth this trouble, David Chastain,” she grumbled beneath her breath.

  Then the cacophony of Nicca getting the dogs under control, the footmen loading luggage into the boot, and Mihal wailing over leaving Henwyn, Nicca, and the dogs behind overcame anything but Morwenna’s need to see David safely tucked up in the coach and herself settled with Mihal on her lap. It seemed to take half of an hour, but at last the door slammed, and the footmen climbed onto the box with the coachman.

  Mihal still wailed. Then David began to distract the boy with silly faces and mimicking the voices of various animals. While the carriage dipped and bounced over the rutted road, David persuaded Mihal to speak the names of different animals according to the sounds they made. By the time they reached the public road and turned left toward Bastion Point, Mihal had fallen asleep in Morwenna’s arms.

  She lifted her eyes to David’s, only to find him gazing down at her, that heart-stopping smile on his lips. She swallowed and flicked her gaze away. “Thank you.”

  “I miss my family.”

  “I expect they miss you, especially after your father . . .” She trailed off, leaving space for him to say something.

  But the carriage dropped into a rut in the drive, jostling them forward. David grunted and grabbed for the overhead strap. Morwenna braced her feet and clutched Mihal too tightly, waking him up.

  “Dog,” he bellowed.

  “You’ll see the dogs tomorrow.” A ridiculous thing to say. He didn’t know what that meant.

  Morwenna closed her eyes, suddenly too tired to face another quarter hour or more of jouncing along the Cornish lanes barely fit for horses, let alone a carriage.

  “Allow me?” David took Mihal from her. This time he distracted him with one of the buttons off his coat. It was too big to harm the child, who put everything into his mouth, and Morwenna decided to say nothing about how unkempt they would arrive with David less one button on his coat and her hem dragging like an uneven train. Grandmother would certainly use it all for an excuse to take over their wardrobes, if not their comings and goings. At the same time as she worried about that, she admired a man who considered the needs of a small child for entertaining over the impression he made upon the arrival at a fine country estate—and more. He recognized her weariness, much of it due to nursing him, and, without saying a word, helped to alleviate her discomfort.

  “So you spend a great deal of time with your nieces and nephews?” she asked.

  “Most evenings we are all together with the children.” He glanced up at her. “We have a nursemaid who helps out with the little ones, but my sister and sister-in-law usually see to the care of their own children.”

  A criticism of her? It wasn’t deserved. She was trying to run what was left of Penmara and save the rest, once the work of the lord of the manor, but Morwenna’s responsibility with Mihal three months shy of two years old. She looked at David. “You remembered the dogs from the beach.” She made it a statement.

  “I think I may have regained consciousness long enough to remember them lying beside me. When I heard them baying outside at Penmara, I asked Nicca to bring them up to me.” He snatched the button before it fell to the floor. “I like dogs.” He wiped the button on his sleeve, then tilted it toward Mihal. “Look at that. You can see yourself.”

  “They like you—the dogs, that is.”

  “Dogs and children.” He cupped Mihal’s hand in his and placed the button between the delicate fingers. “See, if you hold it like this . . .”

  Mihal stared at his miniature reflection in the shining silver. “See.”

  “Another word.” Morwenna wanted to hug her child. She felt odd without him on her lap, but he seemed so content where he was, she dared not remove him.

  And they were almost there. The carriage turned between the pillars with their crouching lions, and the drive grew smoother, the rumbling of the wheels quieter. On either side of them, trees marched with well-tended shrubbery beneath.

  David glanced out the window, and his eyebrows arched. “This is where you grew up? Or did you live elsewhere with your parents?”

  “I lived here with my parents and then here with my grandparents.” She clutched her hands together on her lap and did not look out the window. “My parents left for some adventure when I was near Mihal’s age. They have only come home three times since.”

  “They haven’t wanted to meet their grandson?”

  “They don’t know they have a grandson.” Morwenna’s throat closed. “They haven’t been home in five or six years.”

&
nbsp; “How sad to not have your parents around. My father . . .” He leaned his head back against the squabs and closed his eyes. The action didn’t disguise the pain etched on his features.

  Mihal threw the button across the carriage and began to wail. Morwenna took him back onto her lap and held him close, murmuring what she thought was nonsense to him, words she often crooned, a lullaby of declarations. “We have each other. We are our family. We aren’t alone when we’re together.” And on and on she spoke to him when he was tired or hungry or frightened until the carriage rolled to a halt before the fan-shaped steps of Bastion Point and she found David’s hand on her arm.

  “My lady?”

  Morwenna jumped and looked at him.

  He was staring out the window past her. “There’s a military officer of some sort here.”

  Morwenna followed his gaze to where three men in uniform filled the doorway to her grandparents’ house. But they weren’t military precisely. They were riding officers, revenue men, the sort who would be investigating a suspicious wreck of a ship.

  CHAPTER 6

  DAVID HAD NEVER BEFORE SEEN ANYONE’S FACE LOSE color in a heartbeat. Morwenna was so fair he wouldn’t have thought she could grow even whiter, but the instant she glanced out the window, the delicate pink across her cheekbones leeched away and her breathing ceased.

  “My lady?” He wanted to take her hand. The baby decided to squirm down at that moment, and all David’s attention centered on stopping the boy without hurting himself. Mihal fought him, his gaze intent upon the shining button lodged between the other seat and the wall. From the corner of his eye, David saw that the lad’s mother was focused on the riding officers, and she was frightened.

  Guilty?

  “My lady—”

  The carriage door opened and a footman dropped the steps before David could ask her anything. She started to rise, stopped, looked at Mihal. “I . . . need to get him inside.”