Marquesses at the Masquerade(96)
Luddington gestured elegantly with his glass, spilling not a drop. “A pleasure, Tyne. As always.”
Tyne made his way home, his steps taking him past the house where he’d kissed his goddess the night before. He’d been up early out of habit and taken a morning stroll through the back alleys of the neighborhood, pausing to inquire at the mews regarding the sixth house from the corner.
A pair of devout older widows dwelled there—both stable boys had agreed. The ladies kept a pony cart for trips to Hounslow, where one of them had a son who was a schoolteacher. No young lady had ever bided with them, and the son was unmarried.
Freya, in other words, had lied. Tyne did not care for dishonesty, but a lady was entitled to her privacy when a masked man asked for kisses in the dark. He hadn’t exactly been forthcoming himself.
Her demeanor had suggested she’d have little patience with a dull marquess who could spend fifteen minutes debating which waistcoat to wear for a speech fewer than a dozen men would hear.
He set aside thoughts of Freya, for another forthright female awaited Tyne in the family parlor, one whom he was equally unlikely to impress with his speeches, ledgers, and politics.
“Miss Fletcher, good day.”
She set aside her book and rose. “Your lordship.” The light in her eye suggested a battle was about to be joined, and Tyne barely refrained from smiling in anticipation.
Chapter Three
* * *
The scent of England was always Giles Throckmorton’s first impression of home: briny and brisk regardless of the weather, with an undertone of ancient geology, as if the stony hills ringing Portsmouth lent an aged, unchanging bedrock to even the smell of the place.
The languages he heard along the docks and in the coaching inn’s common were mostly English, with smatterings of French, other Continental tongues, and the occasional American accent. The variety would have been still greater in Portugal, for that nation had made seafaring even more a part of its soul than England had.
“Good to be home again?” Giles’s brother, John, asked, stepping down from a smart traveling coach in the inn yard.
“Always good to be home, but it’s beastly cold here.”
John clapped him on the back. “This is a fine spring day, nearly hot, but every time you come home, you complain of the cold. Portugal has made you soft.”
Portugal had made Giles desperate.
He returned to England yearly, mostly to get away from his children, also to gain a respite from the alternating work and worry of the vineyard. He’d learned enough of the winemaker’s trade to realize wealth was accumulated over decades, if not generations. Worries accumulated overnight.
“How are matters in Portugal?” John asked as Giles’s trunks were loaded onto the back of the coach.
John was being tactful, but then, John was a diplomat, always haring off to some treaty negotiation or conference.
“Matters in Portugal are difficult. The twins grow in mischievous tendencies as well as height, and the younger two follow the example of their elders. Without Catalina to mind the domestic concerns, I’m hard put to give the vineyards the attention they’re due.”
“You were married to the lady for years. Of course you still miss her.”
Giles missed Catalina’s ability to charm her father and brothers into assisting with the vineyard. He missed her management of the nursery and the household, however mercurial that management had been. He’d loved and admired his wife, and loved and admired the notion of building a vineyard empire with her.
But more than a year after her passing, there was also much— much—Giles did not miss about her. The guilt of that admission was tempered by the notion that if the boot had been on the other foot, Catalina would likely have felt the same about him.
“Do you like your wife, John?”
John pretended to study how the groom secured a trunk to the boot. “I like Agnes exceedingly, more with each passing year. We are friends first and spouses as a result of that friendship. Agnes understands me, and I very much value her counsel and affection.”
Catalina’s counsel had often been delivered at high volume and to the accompaniment of shattered porcelain. Her affections had become rare after the birth at long last of a daughter. Had Catalina not perished of a lung fever, the marriage would doubtless have found firmer footing as the children matured.
Giles had assured himself of that happy prognostication often in the early days of widowerhood. For the past few months, he’d taken to assuring himself that an English wife, one inured to the tribulations of the nursery and happy to improve her station even at the cost of journeying to a foreign land, would solve many of his troubles.
“Agnes will be so pleased to see you,” John said as a fresh team was put to. “We very nearly dropped in on you after our last jaunt to Gibraltar.”
“I would have been delighted to receive you.” A lie, that. Without Catalina to nip at the house servants’ heels, the staff did the bare minimum in terms of cleaning and maintenance. The harvest last year had been disappointing, and competition in the port market was fierce.
Giles was determined to take an English bride back to the chaos he’d left behind in Portugal, and his efforts in that regard would start with Miss Lucy Fletcher. The lady had cause to recall him fondly—very fondly, in fact. He’d paint a romantic picture of his fiefdom in Portugal, play a few bars of the grieving widower’s lament, and take Miss Fletcher away from the drudgery of her life as a governess in the household of some stodgy old marquess.