Page 48 of The Mad Baron's Bride
“She is on her guard. I can understand that.”
As a girl herself, Leda had been open and trusting, at least when it came to her sister. She had learned early to be wary of her mother’s motives, but had for the most part found the world a hospitable place, right up until she met the man her parents meant her to marry.
Muriel had been betrayed young by her mother’s death. She would not see the world as a warm and welcoming place at all.
Jack stood beside her, and Leda’s stomach did that strange dance it reserved only for him. “She’s usually so biddable,” he said. “I’ve never seen her this—mulish.”
Leda looked at him in surprise. “Milord Brancaster, your daughter is nothing but mulish.” She had needed less than ten minutes in Muriel’s company, on the occasion of their first meeting, to see that the girl was mostly hair, pale skin, and backbone. If she was biddable, it was only for her father.
Because perhaps she thought that was what he wished. Or what she thought was necessary to her survival.
Jack looked as if she had struck him, his gray eyes capturing the range of colors in the sky. He was made of this place, and belonged here. In the countryside, he didn’t walk like someleashed predator, his power strapped in and contained. Here, in these wild open spaces, he was at home.
“How is she for you?” Leda asked softly. As Jack watched his daughter, she saw again in his eyes the bewilderment of an otherwise capable man who didn’t know the first thing to do with the small creature placed in his care. Her heart ached for Muriel, losing her mother, and for him, who had lost near as much.
He turned away. “Today, in the cart, was the most I’ve heard her speak in months.” He paused, his back toward her. “She speaks toyou.”
“Perhaps she is still grieving,” Leda said. “How long ago did her mother die?”
“Six years.” He looked again toward the pond, as if it pained him to see his daughter distance herself, but he couldn’t look away.
Six years was not a recent loss. Time enough for the first wounds of grief to scab over, as she knew. Some men moved on once their year of mourning was complete, or even before then. Jack’s walls were as high and firm as his daughter’s.
What had happened to this family, that the surviving members locked themselves away?
And what had led milady Brancaster to jump? To leave what the world would see as her comfortable home, her beautiful daughter, her handsome and no doubt quite doting husband?
Madness. Or desperation, like Lady Sydney had said.
Jack moved away, and she felt his departure like a physical diminishing. “Have you ever been in a brick kiln?” he called over his shoulder.
Leda wavered. She understood that where she chose to stand would indicate her alliance in this household. Did she move toward Muriel, standing in for governess, holding guard as thegirl trailed her fingers through blooming knapweed and purple moor-grass? Or did she wait near the cart, like the servants?
She ought to keep her distance from Jack. Regard him, if not as an employer, then her employer’s nephew. Family acquaintance, no more. Despite that kiss.
But that kiss had happened. Kisses. So had their dance, and their walk on Maud Heath’s Causeway, and their many dinners, and shared miles and hours in the carriage, sometimes talking, sometimes drifting in a silence that felt shared and serene, demanding nothing. All of those moments bound her to him with small sure threads, tight as the knots on Muriel’s pocket.
He paused at the rim of the kiln, a pit dug into the earth, and turned to her, his eyes glowing like sun rising behind a veil of fog. He rippled with aliveness, with that alert but quiet intensity she had noticed in him from the first.
“Coming? You’ve seen nothing like this in your West Country, I promise.”
She made her choice, a declaration to the others of where her loyalties lay. An admission of sorts, for she was helpless to resist him. He lured her like the flicker of a warm hearth on an icy day, the call of a candle in the window across a heath dark and cold with storms.
He beckoned, and she followed, as if she had no sense of self-preservation whatsoever. As if he hadn’t led another woman to her doom, and Leda might be next.
“Jumped,”one farm wife said confidently, bundling asparagus for Leda. “Though if you arst others, they’ll saypushed, tha will.” She sent a glare toward another goodwife, sidling over with her apron full of cauliflower sprouts and turnip tops.
“Oi say pushed, and thas the right of it an’orl.” The second woman peeped open her apron for Leda’s inspection like a smuggler sporting stolen wares.
“Thassa lud a squit,” a third woman announced, plunking a basket of pears on the first woman’s table and leaning in. “It warnt neither. He thacked her on the lug, dint he, and tipped her ore the edge. An she never made a deen, the poor mawther, tha she dint, jes sank her down to a watery grave.”
“Hold yew hard,” said the first in irritation. “She warnt in the water. They found her bones all frooz the next day on the shingle.”
“Who found her?” Leda asked, agog at this wealth of information. The farm wives of Snettisham didn’t hold a bit with the coy crosstalk of Bath parlors or assembly rooms. The moment she had shown up in the broad dusty triangle of the market, where the sellers vied to place their carts or blankets beneath the spreading branches of a great oak, the good women of Snettisham had been talking over one another to answer Leda’s questions about the mad baron Brancaster and his late, little-lamented wife.
A silence fell at this last, however. The second woman shook her head, her white cap peeking out beneath a straw bonnet. “The little mawther founder, thas her daughter, and she hant been the same after.”
“And his lordship went all titchy, too,” the first goodwife added. “Tha say he went mad.”
