Page 25 of Tremaine's True Love
“Have a care, Mr. St. Michael. You’re wealthy, well traveled, and you can spout poetry. Best not relax your guard. Will you share this apple?”
He produced a knife, the folding knife with the sharp, sharp edge, and set about quartering and coring the apple. Nita was about to ask him why marriage—an arrangement that heavily favored the male of the species—had earned his skepticism when the back door opened on a gust of frigid air.
Her first thought was that Addy or her baby was in distress, followed by a fear that Elsie Nash might have summoned her. Twice before, Nita had silently hurried up the servants’ stairs at Stonebridge to attend Elsie when the rest of the household had been abed.
Belle Maison’s head groom, a venerable Welshman named Alfrydd, stomped snow from his boots.
“Evening, Lady Nita, guv’nor. Rider out from Town has brought the gentleman a letter.” Alfrydd withdrew a sealed note from his pocket, and only now, when a trusted retainer of longstanding studied the bunches of herbs and onions hanging from the rafters, did Nita worry about her appearance.
Abouttheappearances, and she should be beyond that in her own—inher brother’s—kitchen.
Mr. St. Michael tore open the note, scanned it, and cursed in what sounded like Gaelic. “My tups are sickening. Can somebody saddle my horse?”
Alfrydd abruptly left off inspecting the rafters. “It be damned midnight, begging my lady’s pardon. Aye, there’s a moon, but there’s clouds too, and the wind is murderous.”
Nita’s sentiments weren’t half so polite. “You won’t do your sheep any good if you end up freezing to death in a ditch, Mr. St. Michael, or if you come down with lung fever. Alfrydd, have you room for this rider in the grooms’ quarters?”
“Aye, and a pot of tea to offer the fellow.”
Nita wrapped up the remains of the bread loaf in a towel and handed Alfrydd a crock of butter as well.
“Thank the rider for his heroic efforts,” she said, “and be ready for Mr. St. Michael to leave at first light.”
“But my tups are the most valuable—” Mr. St. Michael began, speaking in the loudest—and most Scottish—tones Nita had heard from him.
“Alfrydd, our thanks,” Nita said.
Alfrydd swept Nita with a look that encompassed her slippers, her upset guest, and her hair, hanging over her shoulder in a single braid.
“G’night, my lady. Sir.”
Nita planted herself directly before Mr. St. Michael, between him and the door. “What did the note say?”
“The damned weather is to blame,” he muttered, his gaze on the door Alfrydd had pulled stoutly closed. “Winter hasn’t been bad until these past few weeks, and then we had two snowstorms back-to-back, and some truly bitter temperatures. The water freezes, or is so cold the silly sheep won’t drink it, and if they—my lady, I must go.”
So he could risk his neck for some adolescent rams? “Mr. St. Michael, tell me what the note said.” Nita used the same tone on patients who hadn’t yet realized the seriousness of an injury.
Also on her siblings.
He took the paper from his pocket and shoved it at her. “They’re sick, some of them are down, and that’s a very bad sign. These are my best lads, the ones I had in mind for breeding to your merinos. These fellows don’t get sick, they’re great, strapping youngsters in excellent health, and Imustgo.”
His accent had traveled farther north the longer he spoke, hisr’s strewn along the Great North Road, hist’s sharpening into verbal weaponry as they crossed the River Tweed.
As Nita read the note her mind was pulled in two directions at once. First, Mr. St. Michael took the welfare of his flock seriously, and not out of simple duty or commercial concern. He cared for these smelly, woolly, bleating creatures. Their suffering mattered to him.
That insight was at variance with the gruff, businesslike demeanor Mr. St. Michael showed the world.
Nita’s second thought was an unwelcome question: Was this how she herself reacted to word that some child had fallen ill or some grandmother was at her last prayers with no one to sit with her? St. Michael’s sheep had shepherds as well as the sheep’s equivalent of stable boys, and yet he trusted no one to deal with the situation but himself.
Grandmothers had grandchildren. Children had mothers and fathers, and yet, never once had Nita questioned that she must hare off to attend any who summoned her.
In this weather, at this hour, she’d permit no haring off. “Mr. St. Michael, please sit.”
“I don’t want to blastedsit. When I’ve taken every precaution, fed them extra rations, added hot water to their icy buckets at considerable effort on the part of—”
Nita took Mr. St. Michael by the shoulders and turned him toward the hearth, which was rather like persuading Atlas away from his hay.
“Listen to me,” she said, when he’d finally acquiesced to her prodding and resumed his seat. “My brother has pigeons. Your sheep are in Oxfordshire?”
