Page 45 of The Mad Baron's Bride
Leda shivered and pulled her cloak tight to her shoulders. She wasn’t cold, but the wind rushed through her as if she were hollow, awakening a sudden ache.
The place was austere, but it was a home. She hadn’t had a home in so long.
Jack turned onto the pebbled drive fronting the house. The boy they’d hired in Lynn Regis to return the cart, who was currently riding the near horse, stared as curiously as Leda.
“Oi, so here’s the place as the Mad Baron lives!” he marveled. “Yew ain’t afreard he’ll do yew in, sir?” He twisted around to regard Jack. “A thack on the hid, a toss ore the cliff, and downards you go.” He whistled as he curved his hand through the air, mimicking a falling body.
Jack winced. “Famous all the way in Lynn Regis, is he?”
The boy nodded solemnly. “Int many ghosties an’orl in these places. They’s the Edward Queen in Rising and the Henry Queen in Blickling, an ta. The Mad Baron’s bride.” He gestured toward the house.
Leda bit her lip. Anywhere else, she’d have caught Jack’s eye, shared a smirk of knowing amusement with him. But here, in the shadow of his home, he was not amused. And the wild air about the place made Leda feel very far from the stately, civilized rooms of Bath, where under the light of many candles and the crowds of gracious revelers, superstitions held no purchase. On these cliffs and fens, where the land stood so empty all about, a specter might take form, grow teeth.
Bird calls pierced the air, a noisy chorus, but the house sat quiet. No shadows passed before the windows inside, and outside, nothing moved save for the wind in the branches of a lone holm oak holding its crooked arms toward the sky. A brown goose with pink feet poked through the scrubby grass that lined the drive.
Leda hadn’t been this nervous about meeting her husband. She’d known at the time she wouldn’t get on with Bertram Toplady. But she very much wished for Muriel to like her, and the worry crashed through her stomach like the sound of waves not far away, somewhere out of sight.
Jack seemed nervous, too. He’d been stiff and scrupulously correct through their entire second day of travel, sitting upright in the chaise as if he feared he might slump and accidentally touch her. They took their supper at opposite ends of the table in a private parlor he arranged and said a formal goodnight at the door of the separate rooms he paid for.
And she had a chaperone, of sorts. Early in the morning before they left Swindon, Leda had entered the kitchens of their inn and before the bread was finished baking found a girl willing to travel with them as their maid, lending an air of respectability. With as quickly as she was ready to leave, Leda sensed that Grace Haycot was escaping something, or someone, and she had half expected the girl to peel off in Cambridge, or Lynn Regis, ready to seek her fortune in town.
Leda also suspected that young Grace carried a secret that would, in five or six months, make her ineligible for service in a genteel household. But as Grace had not broached the matter to Leda, Leda would not raise it to her. Instead, she watched as the girl hopped down from the dog cart, collecting her string bag.
“What’s that and all about a ghost?” she asked the boy.
“A local superstition, I gather.” Leda turned to find Jack holding out his hand to her.
Sometime in the journey, he had stopped being Brancaster in her mind and become simply Jack. Perhaps it was watching him teach Ives how to hold his fork and cut his meat like a gentleman. Or that dazzling kiss. The memory rushed through her in random moments, raising her blood, making her skin tingle like a coming storm.
She’d grasped any reason to push him away, could barely recall now what slender excuse she’d given that they shouldn’t indulge in attraction. Yet it hadn’t quelled her response to him, and her chest heated with a blush as he watched her. His hand was so strong, as was all of him, solid and firm to the ground. Hisgray eyes matched the sky. He was a man a woman could lean on, if she dared.
Leda didn’t dare lean on anyone. But he clasped her hand firmly, placing his other hand on her elbow as he helped her step down from the cart, and the ache opened wider, deeper.
She could not afford to be daft. She took a deep breath and faced the house.
Atop a low wall to the side of the house lay a line of bricks of assorted colors and sizes. Two had swelled with moisture to the size of loaves. One had split apart. Another looked as if had melted.
One, a pale rectangle, Jack picked up in his hand, and it crumbled back into sand. Another just like it performed the same way.
He sighed. “Wrong again.”
“What are you attempting?”
“I’m convinced the soil around here would be good for making bricks. The Romans knew the secret, which is why so many of their ruins survive, but it was lost during the Dark Ages. The Tudors found it again, with the help of Dutch and Flemish settlers. You’ll see many of the great houses hereabouts have been redone in the last century. But the recipe is different depending on the soil, and I have not found the knack of it here.”
“And these are the experiments you are teased about,” Leda observed.
“Once, it would have been my trade. Could I manage it now, it’d be a business that could keep an estate alive, were it in difficulties.” He swept his gaze over the house and grounds, still but for the keening wind.
Was his estate in difficulties? Struggling to produce, burdened with debt? Lady Plume had spoken with affection of the graciousness of Holme Hall, and as they entered through the wooden front doors, Leda could see the bones of itsformer splendor. The domed ceiling of the vestibule dangled an enormous chandelier above the floor, stone inlaid with marble. A wooden staircase led to the floors above, and arched doorways led to state rooms on either side.
The far wall, beyond the staircase, held a tall case clock, a polished occasional table, and a vast oil pointing of a Cavalier knight astride a rearing white charger. Beside it a small, discreet door opened and two women spilled out of a hall Leda guessed led to the service rooms and, she hoped, a water closet.
“Cor blarst me, ’tis himself,” one was saying as they bustled forth. “May, stand ahind me and dint you jiffle.” The elder pushed the younger at attention before the table, both of them patting aprons and caps into place before the elder bobbed a curtsey, then elbowed the younger to indicate she do the same. “Yer lordship. We hant thought you coming today.”
“I had hoped to send warning, but we traveled as fast as the mail,” Jack said cordially. “Mrs. Wroth, this is Mrs. Leech, my cook and housekeeper, and May, our maid of all work. I have brought Mrs. Leda Wroth of Bath, lately companion to my Aunt Plume, to arrange a governess for Muriel.”
Both women dropped another curtsey. Mrs. Leech rose with a slight shake of the head, as if she were unconvinced of Leda’s ability to take on this task. May, too, looked doubtful, but nonetheless offered a polite greeting. “How you goin,’ milady?”
