A Spinster by the Sea Read online

  Anne gathered up her hems and was waiting for the most recent wave to recede when she noticed that a man stood two yards from her wayward hat. His dark hair riffled in the breeze, and he, too, had discarded boots and stockings.

  Anne’s next impression was one of size. This fellow was tall even standing barefoot, and he bristled with muscle and confidence. Not a farm lad, not with that fine lawn shirt and those exquisitely tailored riding breeches. He’d draped his coat over his arm—a beautiful dark blue merino—and his cravat sported a touch more lace than strictest fashion dictated.

  Anne shaded her eyes with her hand as the intruder sketched her a slight bow.

  “Miss Baxter, good day.”

  Oh, ye gods and little fishes. That Hades-at-his-forge voice, which all the public school education in England could not make into a gentlemanly drawl.

  “Tindale,” Anne said, her minuscule store of pleasure in the day washing straight out to sea. “Of all the dukes in all of creation, why must you be the one to disturb my solitude?”

  He snatched up her hat and tossed it to her with a flick of his wrist. Anne caught it, though she nearly had to give up her grip on her skirts to do so.

  “Your lucky day, Miss Baxter, and before you go storming off in high dudgeon, allow me to say that you’re better off without him, and he would have bored you silly.”

  That was not what Anne had expected Tindale to say, but then, Tindale was a quiet sort, new to his title, and he seldom said much of anything.

  “We are on a beach, Your Grace. High dudgeon with my skirts bunched up and my feet bare is beyond me.” To say nothing of a nose likely turning redder by the moment.

  Anne waded free of the water and let those skirts drop. “You truly think I’m better off in disgrace?”

  “Not in disgrace,” he said. “Free, and how I envy you that privilege. You must be profoundly relieved not to face a lifetime of humoring Lord Corbett’s endless conceits. Let’s walk, shall we?”

  The beach was in plain sight of Rose Cottage, where Anne and Helen were biding, and also visible from the inn itself. Walking with Tindale would in no way be improper.

  Nor, Anne suspected, would it be wise. He’d offered her the one gift she’d never thought to have from Lord Corbett’s best man and the Season’s most eligible peer—the truth.

  “I am mortally relieved,” she said, taking the duke’s arm, “and I cannot muster even a scintilla of guilt about that. What brings you to the shore, Your Grace, and how long are you staying?”

  He ambled along, as relaxed as if they promenaded around a drawing room at Devonshire House. “Not long enough, Miss Baxter. When I contemplate what awaits me back in Mayfair, I must admit I’m not staying at the shore nearly long enough.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  Chapter Two

  If Augustus lived to be a doddering old man, he would never forget the sight of Anne Baxter wading in the surf, her skirts bunched not decorously at midcalf, but drawn clear up to her knees. Her legs were muscular and shapely, though Tindale had spared them only a glance.

  Her face had captured his whole attention. She was not classically beautiful—no delicate retroussé nose, porcelain complexion, or limpid blue eyes. Miss Baxter was a honey-blonde with a strong nose and a direct emerald gaze.

  Her eyes had been closed, her face tipped up to the breeze, her whole being absorbed with the sensations of cold salt water and brilliant spring sunshine on bare skin. She had been both worshipping nature and a testament to its glories.

  Odd thoughts for a duke who still had the mind of a solicitor, and Augustus had stood gaping on the beach much longer than either a duke or a solicitor—or a gentleman—should have.

  “I ought to have left you your privacy,” he said as they ambled along the packed sand near the water’s edge. “I had no idea you’d come to the Siren’s Retreat to hide.”

  “I am not hiding, Your Grace. I am pondering my course going forward.”

  She was hiding, of a certainty, and doing it properly—with lots of pride and a few handy euphemisms. “The ocean makes pondering easy,” Augustus replied. “Puts matters in perspective. We see but a tiny sliver of its horizon. How grand are the troubles we contemplate compared to such vast splendor?”

  “Are you trying to console me, Your Grace?”

  Augustus had acquired the ducal title months ago—or it had acquired him—and he still found formal address jarring. A plain mister knew his place in the world, while a duke was an oddity even in that rarefied collection of decorative specimens known as the British peerage.

  “I am trying,” Augustus said, “to make polite conversation with you. Be patient with me, Miss Baxter. I am new to my honors.”

  “Polite conversation goes like this, Your Grace. ‘Miss Baxter, what a pleasure to see you. The sunshine at the shore is always so bright, isn’t it?’ Then I say, ‘Wonderfully so after a London winter.’ You reply, ‘But the breeze can be a trifle brisk, don’t you agree?’ And I respond… Come, Your Grace, give it a go. What would I say if I were being polite?”

  She described polite conversation like a barrister’s courtroom debate with king’s counsel. Everybody taking a turn bloviating about the obvious. Whack the shuttlecock, air the counterargument.

  “You say,” he replied, “that you find fresh air in moderation invigorating. Then somebody brings up the topic of the last time it rained or the next time it might rain or the possibility that we need rain, and we all smile inanely.”

  “It will get easier,” Miss Baxter said. “My parents had the bad grace to depart the earthly realm when I was thirteen. I was the much-indulged only child of a pair of unconventional thinkers. In the summer, I seldom wore shoes between one Sunday service and the next. I went from that to… Aunt Daphne and Uncle Potter, who set great store by order and decorum.”

  “You do not?” Anne Baxter had stood up with fortune hunters, bachelor peers, and everything in between and treated them all to the same lovely smile. Augustus had never asked her to dance, in part because he did not want that smile aimed at him.

  Distant and gracious both, with only a hint of arch humor. A sword and shield. A strategy produced for a battlefield populated with gossips, matchmakers, and rakes.

  “I am an heiress,” Miss Baxter said. “This fate befell me when I turned fifteen, and my uncle Thomas went to his reward. I had had a decent portion before that from my parents. I wasn’t a charity case, but I went from marginalized to ostracized. One learns to be unobtrusive at the watering hole, whether one is an antelope or a lioness.”

  What an odd—and apt—analogy.

  “And how does one go on at the watering hole if one is an elephant?” Augustus asked as they approached the rocks that defined the western end of the beach. “I walk into a room, and it’s as if the very clocks change how they tick because a duke has arrived.”

  “The elephants are invariably dignified, but I suspect they go on however they please to. We have established that I have come to the seaside to plan my strategy for dealing with Lord Corbett’s defection. What brings you here, Your Grace?”

  “You might not admit to hiding, but I will,” Augustus said. “My godmother is holding a house party, an intermission in the social Season. Her entertainments are an exclusive respite for those who can eschew the Mayfair whirl for a fortnight—or so she claimed when I was fool enough to accept her invitation.”

  “Your godmother is Lady Deschamps?”

  “None other, but too late, I realized I am not attending a house party, Miss Baxter. I have arrived at a horse auction. A dozen heiresses are accosting me on the way to breakfast and squeezing my arm as if considering whether to bet on me in tomorrow’s fourth race. I cannot walk into the conservatory or read a single paragraph on the terrace without… I am whining.”

  “Lamenting,” Miss Baxter said, clapping a hand over the crown of her hat as a strong gust blew past. “Lady Deschamps is a noted matchmaker. Surely you grasped that when you agreed to attend this horse auction?”

  “Are you laughing at me?”

  “Yes, and at the situation. I am now the twice-jilted pariah who will be invited everywhere to provide fuel for gossip, but nobody will ever again offer for me. You are the former solicitor raised to the peerage, and any woman in Mayfair would be delighted to accept your proposal for reasons that likely baffle the solicitor. We will both have many opportunities to socialize, and we would both rather not. What is it you’d be reading if the ladies left you in peace long enough to finish a paragraph?”

  “Restoration comedies,” Augustus replied. “Such wit and insight all dressed up as shockingly vulgar farce. Charles II was right to reopen the theaters, and for that alone, I respect him.”

  “Few do, at least not for that. Who is your favorite playwright?”

  As Augustus and Miss Baxter wandered down the shore, the discussion wandered as well, from the witty Aphra Behn to William Wycherley to John Vanbrugh. Miss Baxter was thunderously well-read and a strong advocate for the theater as a means of empowering women.

  Not an aspect of dramatic history Augustus had considered previously. “We have debated away half the afternoon,” he said as he and Miss Baxter sat side by side on his coat.

  They occupied a sun-warmed rock at the western end of the beach, and Augustus was pathetically sorry to see the discussion end.

  “And a pleasant afternoon it has been, Your Grace.” Miss Baxter rose and swatted at her skirts. “You’ve helped me forget for a time that I have a muddle to sort out. I wish you luck with the heiresses.”

  “I will need more than luck to evade capture, Miss Baxter. They are an enterprising lot.”

  “Are you being polite, Your Grace?” Miss Baxter resumed her place beside him, her gaze on the little cottage that occupied the promontory over the beach.

  “Yes. These women are determined and arrogant, as if I should be thrilled to have gained their notice.”

  “They dance exquisitely,” Miss Baxter said. “They dress in the first stare, and they speak a language of innuendo and insult that you can barely grasp. Put them in breeches, and they’d be polite society’s eligibles. I’m sorry, Your Grace. Nobody should have to spend two minutes, much less two weeks, in such company. Perhaps if you put it about that you have a dread disease, they might desist.”

  She was serious, and the idea actually had some merit. “You considered that strategy?”

  “Briefly. One must not tempt fate.”

  Her gaze went to the distant silvery horizon, and for a moment, Augustus would swear the ruthlessly self-possessed Miss Baxter was near tears. Then the breeze lashed the scarlet ribbon of her hat across her cheek, and her expression became again the serene regard of a woman whose affairs were quite in order.

  “Who was he?” Augustus asked.

  She shook her head. “Just a lovely fellow, a long time ago. Consumption. Once he realized he would not recover, he took himself off to some Greek island and told me to think of him fondly.”

  “You would have gone to that Greek island with him.”

  “I begged…” Miss Baxter fell silent, and Augustus was certain she had never begged anybody for anything since parting from that ailing young man. “So you see, Your Grace, I am, in fact, thrice-jilted. Lord Corbett decamping with the fair Marie was simply tradition upheld, though it’s not a tradition I intend to participate in any longer.”

  Augustus wanted to take Miss Baxter’s hand, to put an arm around her shoulders. He settled for patting her wrist.

  “When Marie—whom we ought not to be mentioning—realizes that her devoted swain is pockets to let, she’ll toss him aside like last week’s porridge. He’ll come crawling back to Town, hat in hand—the Spanish moonbeams top hat, not the cooing dove—and you will have a good laugh at his expense.”

  “No, I will not,” Miss Baxter said, getting to her feet and collecting her boots and stockings. “I wish him well, and I wish you well too, Your Grace. Thank you again for a lovely chat.”

  “I am new to my honors,” Augustus said, rising, “but I know enough to see you to your door, Miss Baxter.”

  “Afraid the coastal trade will haul me off to the Barbary pirates?” She gazed out to sea, where not so much as a dinghy sailed the ocean blue.

  Augustus was not afraid of pirates, but neither did he want to part company with Miss Baxter, and he positively loathed the thought of returning to dear Godmama’s horse auction.

  “There is no coastal trade in these parts,” he said, gathering up boots and jacket to fall in beside her. “Nowhere to reliably hide the goods close to shore without being seen, and the tides and reefs make landing on the available beaches difficult. You are safe from pirates, Miss Baxter.” But not from fortune hunters, impecunious spares, or malicious gossips. “I’d like your word on something.”

  She marched along the waterline, a far cry from the meandering pace they’d set before. “I am fresh out of vows, Your Grace.”

  “Assure me you won’t do anything rash, Miss Baxter. Don’t think to go sea-bathing with rocks sewn into your pockets or toss yourself from the nearest cliff.”

  She paused at the foot of the trail that led up to the pretty cottage. “If I were that given to melodrama, I would have tried swimming to Greece.”

  “You loved him?”

  “I was seventeen. I loved him with the desperation that typically afflicts people of that age.” A statement of fact, with a hint of old bewilderment beneath it. “Gossip and slander do not trouble me, Your Grace. I will find a way forward eventually. You must assure me you will not do anything rash at your godmother’s house party.”

  He did take her hand, the better to assist her up the slope of the path. “Such as?”

  “Proposing to the least vexatious of the lot. If you are presented with a half-dozen possibilities, you begin to think that one or two of them might do, and then you become so weary of being chased that might-do becomes won’t-be-so-bad. Next thing you know, you’ve pledged yourself for life to a henwit whose best features are good personal hygiene and an excellent singing voice.”

  The fair Lady Arethusa Hambleton was a fine soprano. That Augustus had noticed this detail suggested Miss Baxter’s warning was timely.

  “I will do nothing rash,” he said. “You will do nothing rash. Will you walk again by the shore tomorrow, Miss Baxter?”

  They approached the small stone dwelling where she’d come to do her seaside pondering. Rose Cottage, one of several on the grounds of the Siren’s Retreat inn, which sat on the far side of a grove of handsome elms.

  “Tomorrow at, say, two of the clock, Your Grace?”

  “Weather permitting. The young ladies are napping at that hour, or off conjuring spells to part me from my bachelorhood.”

  Augustus escorted Miss Baxter up the steps to her front door. The view here was peaceful and the feeling quite private. The property was likely in demand for honeymooning couples, which was neither here nor there. The Siren’s Retreat was said to be a place to find true love, though Miss Baxter was proof that for some, peace and privacy were the more powerful draw.

  “Another walk by the water would be lovely,” Miss Baxter said. “In fact, I will look forward to it. Thank you for the discussion of Restoration comedies. The topic is relevant to my current circumstances.” She kissed Augustus’s cheek and disappeared into her cottage.

  He stood on the covered porch, considering the sea below and what had just passed between him and Miss Anne Baxter. They had merely talked, mostly about old plays, but also about… life. About lost love, scheming heiresses, and compromises regretted.

  Augustus wandered back down to the beach, in no particular hurry. Not until he was once again properly attired in boots and morning coat and making his way through Godmama’s formal garden did he have a label for what he was feeling.

  For months, his internal landscape had been painted in colors of resignation. He’d resigned himself to attending committee meetings, London entertainments, and even—what had he been thinking?—a house party by the sea. He was resigned, which was a careful way of saying he lived in dread. Some obligations were more onerous than others, but for more than half a year, he’d missed the sense of anticipation that a solicitor’s work had given him.

  Solve the client’s problem.

  Negotiate an agreement.

  Render the terms in unassailably precise language.

  Instead, his life had become Your-Grace-must-this, and but-of-course-a-duke-would-never-do-that. His valet and secretary, employees of the previous duke, spewed a litany of rules, restrictions, and obligations.

  A house party by the sea had offered him hope of a respite, a fiction that had doubtless figured in Godmama’s strategy.

  For an hour on the beach, Augustus had forgotten he was a duke, and when he contemplated another hour in Miss Baxter’s company, his anticipation was laced with that almost forgotten boon, joy. He rejoiced to think of his plans for tomorrow afternoon and would count the hours until he could once again walk along the shore with Miss Anne Baxter.

  “A house party mid-Season,” Helen said, pacing the confines of the cottage’s front sitting room as a maid cleared away the lunch dishes. “That takes daring. Two weeks of fresh air is supposed to provide an intermission to the Mayfair madness.” She sent Anne a brooding look. “Lady Deschamps has doubtless established a new trend. Only the most select guests can afford to miss an entire fortnight of the Season.”

  The design of Rose Cottage was simple. A sitting room/kitchen served as the humble equivalent of a great hall, while two bedrooms—one commodious, the other smaller—flanked the central space. A terrace on the seaward side of the building was both sheltered from the wind and blessed with a magnificent view.

  Anne liked Rose Cottage’s compactness and practicality, while Helen described it as poky and quaint. The maid bobbed a silent curtsey and disappeared through the side door with her basket of dishes.