A Stranger at Castonbury(23)

Jamie laughed. Some things at Castonbury had clearly not changed, especially not his sister Phaedra. When she was with her horses everything else vanished for her.

She glanced up at the sound and a smile broke across her face. She ran up the stairs and threw her arms around him, and for the first time he felt like he had truly come home.

‘Jamie!’ Phaedra cried. ‘Oh, Jamie, is it really you? Are you truly back here with us at last?’

‘I am,’ he answered, holding her in his arms. His little sister, all grown up.

Suddenly she pulled back and smacked him hard on the arm. ‘How could you have been gone from us all this time? I can’t tell you how much we missed you, how much Castonbury has suffered.’

‘I know,’ Jamie said solemnly. ‘And I am here to fix all that, I promise. You have worked alone here too long.’

‘I have not been entirely alone. You know I have married.’

‘Yes. A bloke named Basingstoke.’

‘Bram,’ Phaedra said, a soft smile replacing her frown. ‘You will meet him at dinner. And tomorrow I am going to take you to look at the stables so we can talk about what is needed. I intend to make Castonbury the finest horse stud ever seen in England!’ She linked arms with him and walked with him up the stairs, chattering away as she always had when they were children. ‘You will be so proud of what we are doing here, Jamie! I can’t tell you how glad I am you are home at last....’





Chapter Six

That had to be the place.

Jamie drew up his new curricle at the gate of the tiny, ramshackle cottage set at the edge of a wood several miles from Castonbury and far from any other houses or villages. The shutters were all drawn and no smoke curled from the chimney. With the overgrown gardens tangled around its peeling walls, it looked deserted. But his contact had assured him she was there.

When Jamie had gone looking for Alicia Walters, he had found it no easy task. She had fled from the Dower House at Castonbury as soon as Harry had returned from Spain. Her ruse had been discovered, and no one on the estate was sure where she had gone. His father, despite his blustering threats of hangings, hadn’t chased after her, and his siblings were too relieved at learning that their brother was still alive to care. Only one person had seemed concerned about her, and that was the Castonbury estate manager, William Everett.

‘I know what she did was terrible, my lord,’ he had said to Jamie as they walked over the fields. ‘But she must have been coerced in some way, I’m sure. She was too gentle to come up with such a scheme herself. I fear something amiss might have happened to her.’

Jamie had learned a great deal about reading people in Spain, about gauging the true thoughts and emotions they hid behind their words. Everett had worked for the Montagues for a long time and had a reputation for scrupulous honesty and openness. Jamie saw that his words were true—he did believe Alicia to be a good woman pressed in some way to do a bad thing. The man was concerned about her safety now.

And what was more, he cared about her. In his eyes Jamie could see the raw fear, the tenderness, when he said Alicia’s name. The tentative spark of hope. He was afraid he himself had looked just like that when he first saw Catalina. Lovestruck. Foolish.

So Everett saw good in Alicia. But he didn’t know where she had gone. Neither did anyone else on the estate or in Buxton, and most seemed to wish she would stay gone. But finding people who didn’t wish to be found was something else Jamie had learned in Spain. When he went to London to settle the financial accounts, he had looked up some of his more disreputable contacts and got to work.

That work had led him here, to this deserted-looking cottage. It didn’t look like a place where anyone could live, especially not a gentle lady with a small child, but perhaps that was its attraction. No one would think to look here, especially since it was actually close to Castonbury, plus the owner of the land had been abroad for a long time and would charge no rent. He wondered at the cunning mind that had discovered this clever hiding place, that had thought up this dastardly scheme in the first place

Jamie braced his leg against the seat and grimaced as he studied the silent house. He didn’t need to use the stick to get about as much any more—the long walks over the estate to survey what needed to be done had helped with that. But the day in the curricle had made the scars stiffen.

‘You just need to get on a horse again, get out in the hunting field,’ Phaedra had said, sure that a good gallop could cure any ill. But he had laughed and told her that was still a long way in the future, and he had bought this curricle instead. Just one more thing he couldn’t yet do that was expected of him as the heir.