Trenton: Lord Of Loss Read online

  “Let me see you into the house. Those naps can be a trap.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Ellie let him slowly promenade her down the veranda, his arm snugly around her waist, her hand in his. They were barehanded, because they’d been eating. His firm grip on her hand and waist reassured her more than she’d like to admit.

  “The sleeping,” Amherst went on. “Drifting from day to day is easy, and then you don’t sleep at night, and the waking nightmares are as bad as the ones you’d have were you slumbering. Then you’re so useless the next day, you’re taking another nap and up all night yet again.”

  Ellie digested that and continued their measured progress toward the house.

  “You’ve lost someone dear,” she concluded, detecting a slight hesitation in his gait.

  He withdrew the sprig of lavender from his pocket, but at some point, he’d fashioned it into a circle the diameter of a lady’s finger. He presented the little garnish to her with a courtly flourish.

  “Haven’t we all lost somebody dear?”

  * * *

  “Trenton is doing better.”

  Darius Lindsey’s hostess was one woman he didn’t dare lie to. The dowager Lady Warne was a connection formed when Leah Lindsey—Darius and Trent’s sister—had married Nicholas Haddonfield, Earl of Bellefonte. When Nick had joined the family, he’d brought his eight siblings and his grandmother along. With few exceptions they boasted commanding height, lightning intelligence, and a zest for living that made them individually and collectively overwhelming on first impression.

  Lady Warne held out a plate of ginger biscuits, and Darius took two. She kept the plate before him, and he took two more.

  “Define ‘doing better,’ my boy.”

  “He sleeps for more than an hour at a time, really sleeps,” Darius began, searching for compromises between truth and fraternal loyalty. “He’s stopped drinking, except for a glass or two of wine with dinner. He rides again. He’s writing to family and not shut up at Crossbridge the way he was in Town.”

  Lady Warne ran an elegant finger around the rim of her glass. “For some of us, the best medicine is the land, the beasts, the out of doors. Not very aristocratic, but there it is, and quite English. Can you stay with him?”

  No, Darius could not stay with his brother, and not only because Darius had promised to spend the summer in Oxfordshire helping Valentine Windham reclaim an estate from ruin.

  “Hovering won’t serve. Trent might have needed somebody to haul up short on his reins, but he’s on his own now. Many a man has vowed to swear off gin, or gambling, or carousing, and two weeks later he’s at it worse than ever. Trenton has a long way to go, physically, if nothing else.”

  Lady Warne’s finger paused. “Amherst’s health is poor?”

  “He’s a ghost.” Darius could think of no more accurate word. “Five years ago, I would have put Trent up against any dragoon in the king’s army. He could ride, shoot, handle a sword, or quote Shakespeare with the best of them. By comparison, he’s feeble now. If the Crossbridge steward hadn’t run off with the housekeeper, Trent might still be drifting around the town house, skinny as a wraith and twice as pale.”

  Run off, and taken a good sum of household money with them, so lax had Trent’s supervision become.

  “Five years ago, your brother hadn’t capitulated to your father’s choice regarding the succession.”

  Lady Warne had the elderly ability to ignore tender sentiments, and she was right: Paula—or her fat settlements—had been the Earl of Wilton’s choice, and Trent, ever dutiful, had graciously recited the appropriate vows.

  “Trent has been through a rough patch, but he’s stubborn, when he has a reason to be.”

  “Unlike others.” Lady Warne’s smile was devilish. “Others are stubborn for the sheer fun of it.”

  “Is Emily proving stubborn?” Darius set his empty plate down, as if his little sister might be lurking behind the curtains, watching him eat a ridiculous number of fresh, warm ginger biscuits.

  “She is sweet but sensible,” Lady Warne said. “Particularly now that she’s out from under your father’s boot heel. If she doesn’t present herself shortly, though, I will wonder if she hasn’t perfected the art of the feminine dawdle.”

  “Wasted on a brother who wants only to take her for a ride in the park.” And to make sure she was behaving herself.

  “Let me fetch her.” Lady Warne rose gracefully, leaving Darius to sip cold cider and wander the room. He’d been reasonably honest with Lady Warne, for she was old, and as sharp as the rest of her clan. Trent was sleeping, some. He was eating, a little. He was riding short distances, but only because a man without a land steward could either tramp all over his acres or ride a horse, and Trent wasn’t up to the tramping.

  Those glasses of wine at dinner—three or four of them—were consumed with desperate relish, too. Darius had longed to hover, longed to order the servants to empty every bottle of spirits, to put Trent on a schedule of riding and walking and a diet of good summer fare.

  But barging into another man’s life, destroying his dignity, and deciding his fate was the province of the Earl of Wilton, not his grown children. Darius had done what he could for Trent, then withdrawn to tend to other responsibilities.

  He owed Trent the kind of faith Trent had shown him. Trent claimed Darius had saved his life by hauling him bodily down to Crossbridge, but in Darius’s mind, that was simply the return of a favor owed.

  ***

  Arthur, being six feet tall at the withers and gelded, stood biologically and physically above much of what made life trying. This made him an adequate conversationalist for Trent’s return through the woods.

  “And there I was,” Trent muttered, “trying to make small talk with a widow, for the love of flowers.” A papa of small children developed strange epithets. “A woman not three months past the loss of her spouse, and what do I do? Damned near put her in a faint, poor thing. She ought to burn my handkerchief and bury the ashes at a crossroads, mark me on this.”

  Arthur took a nibble of a passing branch.

  “She’s pretty,” Trent went on, ducking to avoid the same branch. “Prettier the longer you look at her, and believe me, horse, I looked. Sat up and took notice.” That had been the strangest sensation, like dreaming he was waking up. The longer Trent had listened to Elegy Hampton’s voice and watched her hands and face, the more alert he’d become, but slowly, like shaking off a drug or a hard knock to the noggin.

  He hadn’t had the same peculiar sense when he’d seen her in her shift singing to the fishes. That had been a different pleasure altogether, though equally unexpected.

  “And God help me, she’ll be on the property tomorrow morning expecting me to converse civilly and offer hospitality.”

  A simple call between neighbors shouldn’t overtax him. He knew the civilities, knew them in his bones, because excellent manners were the first arena in which he’d taken on besting his father. The first of many.

  In the early afternoon heat, the lure of a nap pulled at him strongly, but in keeping with his determination not to scare his brother—Trent’s label for what had been happening in his life before this forced remove to the countryside—Trent handed his gelding to a groom and ambled off on a slow walk instead.

  Because, damn it all to hell and back, one quiet hack of a morning and a slow walk were about all he could manage.

  His footsteps took him through the once-impressive gardens behind his manor house. The sun should have felt oppressive, but when he stopped to rest—to think—on a bench, the soft heat on his face bore the benevolence of an old friend’s voice heard after long absence.

  The gardens were in bad condition, neglected and overgrown past open rebellion. Some beds had succumbed to weeds. Others had been taken over by one of the hardier flowering species, and the whole business gave off an air of a cheerful botanical riot.

  “Even my flowers…” Trent muttered, then caught himself. Talking to a horse was on
e thing, talking to oneself quite another.

  “Thought you were dozing off,” came a voice from behind a twelve-foot-high lilac bush.

  “Show yourself, Catullus.” Trent gave up the pleasure of the sun on his closed eyelids. “I do not pay you to skulk.”

  Cato emerged from the thicket of greenery, a sprig of mint dangling from the left corner of his mouth.

  “Hiding from Cook, are you?” He seated himself beside his employer uninvited and leaned back to enjoy the sun right along with him.

  “She tortured me with menus before breakfast and hinted mightily that a single gentleman ought to entertain when he’s in the country of a summer.”

  “I entertain plenty,” Cato replied, twirling the mint between his teeth. The oral gymnastics and the comment combined in a manner somehow lewd.

  “You entertain the tavern maids.” Trent’s stable master was big, good-looking in a dark-haired Irish way, well muscled, and a thorough scamp with the women—and the ladies. His speech held a hint of a brogue when his emotions ran high or he was foaling out a mare, but his diction and word choice were otherwise refined.

  Not quite Eton, but public school at least and maybe even university. The contradiction of a gentleman’s education with a horse master’s vocation hadn’t struck Trent before.

  Not much had struck Trent…before.

  “Why aren’t you laboring away in my stables?” Trent asked, settling lower on the bench.

  “Work’s done for now. You need to make a decision about your mares.”

  “What decision?”

  “It’s nigh June, your lordship.” Cato’s voice held a hint of irritation. “You wait any longer to breed them, and they’ll be foaling in the worst of the heat and flies next year, with the best of the grass over and done. You can let ’em yeld this year, but a stable master likes to know these things, so he can put a few of the ladies in work. Then too, Greymoor’s stud has a dance card to manage.”

  “Work a mare?” Trent snatched the sprig of mint from between Cato’s lips and tossed it aside. He was irritated with himself more than Cato, because even following a conversation took effort when a man kept picturing a certain damply clad widow on a fishing expedition.

  “A mare,” Cato said with exaggerated patience. “A lady’s mount, by any other name, perhaps even a mount for a sister, or sister-in-law, or daughter. You’ve seen the like, once or twice?”

  “I have.” Trent hunched forward and forced himself to apply his sluggish mind to the question on the floor: What would Lord Amherst like to do with the mares at his country estate, if anything?

  Turn them loose in the home wood and spend the summer wandering after them.

  “You weren’t this stupid two years ago,” Cato remarked when the silence lengthened.

  Or perhaps the mares could trample the stable master.

  “You are big enough and fast enough to make outrageous comments like that, Cato,” Trent replied placidly, because Cato was goading him for some purpose known only to himself. “Don’t think getting a rise out of me will provide a result you’ll enjoy.”

  Cato shrugged broad shoulders and grinned a charming, robust fellow’s grin. “Here in the wilds of Surrey, one finds one’s entertainment where one can, your lordship.” He rose with the easy grace of the strong and fit, though his observation went far beyond impertinent. “Let me know what you decide.”

  As Cato strode off, Trent’s foot, independent of any decision by its owner, shot out and neatly tripped the stable master, who was laughing outright when he regained his balance.

  Cato saluted with two callused fingers. “Better. Not your best effort, but a start.”

  Arthur would probably agree with that assessment.

  Trent did, too.

  Chapter Three

  The weather was glorious, his neighbor punctual, and Trent in a toweringly bad mood as a result. What—what?—had possessed him to invite this Lady Rammel onto his property, much less offer her a gardening project that could stretch for weeks? Even as he knew his anger was irrational—and he knew staying busy was a means of survival early in a bereavement—he resented the way she sat her horse, as if born on its back. He’d ridden like that, once upon time. Darius still rode like that. Cato road as if statues should be erected on his model alone.

  And did Lady Rammel have to fill out her habit so…robustly? He used to take pride in the cut of his clothes and the elegance of his turn-out.

  Did she have to damned smile at his useless stable master when Cato appeared from nowhere to help her off her horse?

  “You’re acquainted with my stable master?” Trent managed as Lady Rammel’s mare was led away.

  “He and Dane were thick as thieves in hunt season.” She beamed as if this was famous good news. “They could natter on about cubbing and tail braiding and line breeding and heaven only knows what else for hours. I expect Mr. Spencer will miss Dane when the hunting starts up in the fall.”

  Mr. Spencer, being Catullus Sandringham Spencer, or Cato, to his many adoring familiars. Trent hated riding to hounds on general principles.

  Also because his father thrived on blood sport.

  “What have you done with Dane’s horses?” Trent heard himself ask.

  Could he have fashioned a more gauche question to put to a huntsman’s bereaved widow?

  Lady Rammel’s smile dimmed. “Odd you should inquire. Dane’s cousin is coming up at the end of the week to take them in hand. The stable lads are going through another round of mourning as we speak.”

  “His cousin?” Trent offered her his arm and searched the viscous morass of his memory for who that might be. Hampton had been titled, and somebody was no doubt dancing a jig on his grave in consequence.

  “Drew,” she said, with no inflection whatsoever. “Dane called him Dutiful Drew, and not only behind the poor man’s back. Drew is the heir and takes his duties seriously.”

  “Is he putting your dower property to rights?”

  “My dower…” Hers brows knit, then her smile reappeared. “I suppose, but I’m happy at Deerhaven. Papa owned Deerhaven outright and set it aside for me in the settlements, so here I’ll stay.”

  “Lucky for me,”—the sentiment was genuine, though sentiments had also, until recently, gone into eclipse along with Trent’s urges—“and for my flowers.”

  What tripe.

  As the lady chattered on and they made several slow circuits of his gardens—he kept up with Lady Rammel easily—Trent began to enjoy his bad mood. Tripe? Tripe? How long had it been since he’d indulged in such a word, even in the privacy of his thoughts?

  He cast his mental hounds, and other words came to mind, bold, articulate terms like asinine, fatuous, and puerile, words a man could toss out with some heat and substance behind them. He started to put all three in a sentence and searched for an appropriately colorful verb to hitch up to them when he realized his companion had fallen silent.

  Some time ago.

  Shite. “I beg your pardon, my lady.”

  “For?”

  Trent kept his eyes forward. “My conversation has deserted me, which would be no great loss, except I’ve put yours to flight as well.”

  “I’m listening to the exchange between your wanton flowers.”

  Wanton was a fine old word. “What are they saying?”

  “The irises are complaining their slippers are too tight,” Lady Rammel informed him. “While the roses need a good hair combing but are planning to parade some splendid finery in a few weeks, nonetheless. The Holland bulbs are tired of dancing and ready for a supper break. The daffodils wish everybody else would hush so one could get some rest.”

  “Are all my flowers female?”

  “Lilacs have woody stems, and they grow quite vigorously, so I think of them as masculine.”

  Woody…old words, vulgar ones, tripped through Trent’s head, and it now became imperative that he keep his eyes front.

  “May we sit a moment here?” Lady Rammel dropped hi
s arm and settled on a shaded bench, the same one Trent had occupied with his stable master. “This had to have been your scent garden, and it’s worth lingering over.”

  Trent settled in beside her, happy to note he hadn’t needed the respite—not quite yet.

  His companion was quiet, apparently content to inhale the effects of a scent garden growing riot on a summer morning. Beside her, Trent’s bad mood had eloped with his conversation, leaving him acutely sensitive to the pleasure of simply sitting beside a pretty woman in the morning air. She wore lavender well for a lady of her coloring, and she hadn’t minced along beside him as if her full corset were torturing her bones.

  He endured the most peculiar impulse to take her hand.

  Lady Rammel closed her eyes and tipped her head back. “Andy wanted to come with me this morning. Her situation can be difficult.”

  “Difficult?” Trent sorted through the implications, while noting that Lady Rammel had long eyelashes. “She’s an only child?”

  “She’s an illegitimate child,” Lady Rammel replied, her tone mild, even weary. “One wants to protect her from unnecessary distress, but not overprotect.”

  The urge to take the woman’s hand persisted. She had freckles over her knuckles, suggesting she didn’t always wear gloves when she gardened. “You are wondering if I would censure you or the child, should you presume to allow her to accompany us through my gardens.”

  “Something like that.” She opened her eyes and studied a tuft of silvery green lavender flourishing before some tall plants Trent didn’t know the name of. “Would you censure me for bringing her?”

  Of course not, but what was Lady Rammel really asking? A man who hadn’t spent a long year clutching the brandy decanter would have puzzled out the subtleties easily.

  “You wonder about the girl’s welcome, because her father is no longer around to insist she be treated civilly?”

  “Yes, though her father is no longer around to gainsay my decisions, either,” Lady Rammel countered, the first hint of steel threading her tone.

  Trent regarded the pretty lady beside him and permitted himself a flash of ire at idiot spouses who left children half-orphaned, particularly for something as foolish as a drunken steeplechase.