Page 1 of A Delicate Deception
Chapter One
Derbyshire, 1824
After only a year of living at Crossbrook Cottage, Amelia had worn a path along the perimeter of the property, a comforting length of bare earth she had trod hundreds of times before, tracing the boundaries of her small, self-contained universe. Here, in a part of Derbyshire sufficiently remote that she could depend upon never being invited to a gathering larger or grander than a card party at the vicarage, but not so far from good roads that her friends and family would be deterred from making brief visits, she felt safe.
Safe, but also ready to weep from boredom.
She hadn’t meant to stay away this long, but the thought of returning to London made her heart race and dread pool in her belly. She was not by nature a quiet and retiring person, but if this isolation was the price of her sanity, she would pay it. Despite the assurances of well-meaning friends, she did not even think this was hyperbole: that last year in town, leading up to... the incident, she had feared herself to be on the verge of something very much like madness.
To keep herself from clawing the cottage walls from sheer boredom, she kept to a routine. Nothing too precise, just a knowledge that she would leave the house as soon as it was light enough to see the path before her, and that she would return home in time for a late breakfast. At this hour she could be certain of running into nobody at all, not the gardener, not the vicar’s officious wife, not so much as a stray dairymaid.
At least that was what she had supposed before she saw the giant. He lumbered along the path she had worn with her own feet as if he weren’t intruding on her property, her quiet, her peace of mind. And then, with God as her witness, he tipped his hat as he passed her by. The next day he did the same, and accompanied his hat tip with what sounded like an oddly old-fashioned “good day to thee.” Infuriating.
By the third day she begrudgingly concluded that he was not a proper giant, merely a large man with a fondness for trespass. Surely he was twice as large as any man needed to be. Worse—because he could not be held responsible for the breadth of his shoulders or the length of his legs—was the fact that he persisted in tipping his hat to her and murmuring a greeting. She would have thought that from her demeanor (eyes unwaveringly set on the path before her, shoulders back, face unsmiling) he might have gathered that she did not wish to acknowledge his presence. She had the rules of etiquette all but etched into her skin, and knew to a certainty that even in the country, ladies were under no obligation to acknowledge any man to whom they had not been properly introduced. That precept was firmly implanted in her mind, along with all the rest of her mother’s teachings, and which rural solitude had for the most part rendered blessedly irrelevant. But still the giant tipped his hat, and did it with such cool courtesy that Amelia felt the fury down to her bones.
“Why not take your walk at another hour?” Georgiana asked when Amelia returned to the cottage, snarling and hissing like an outraged badger.
Amelia flopped into the well-worn chintz chair and glared at her friend. “That would be letting him win.”
“Do you suppose he’s aware that you’re engaged in a contest?” Georgiana asked without looking up from the latestLadies’ Register. She lounged on the sofa, her head on one end and her feet on the other, a cat wedged between her face and the armrest. If for Amelia the country promised solitude, for Georgiana it allowed a degree of idleness that Amelia found frankly inspiring. After over a decade of working as a governess, Georgiana had taken the notion of retiring to the country very literally. She was one of the few people on the planet whose company Amelia felt equal to bearing, partly because most days she was as still and silent as a piece of furniture.
Amelia sniffed. “That hardly matters. I know it is, and that’s enough.”
Georgiana turned a page. “Ooh, Amelia, this would suit you.” She held up a page featuring a fashion plate. “Green velvet, with a pelisse and bonnet to match, I should think.”
“It’s nearly August. Why are you thinking of green velvet?”
“Fine, green satin, have it your way.”
“I didn’t agree to any such thing,” Amelia protested, laughing. “Besides, where on earth would you have me wear a satin gown of any color?” She gestured at their surroundings, indicating the parlor with its plain white curtains and its shabby rug, its single sofa and the table where they took their meals. Looking around, she felt a sense of relief. No stifling gowns. No audience eagerly awaiting her next misstep. Only this little room and the other equally neat and tidy rooms in this cottage. It was a refuge, a sanctuary, the first place on earth she had ever felt that she could rest.
“You can have nice things without needing them,” Georgiana said. “We dine from china when I daresay tin cups or slabs of tree bark would do just as well.” She turned the page of her magazine. “Where do you think your giant lives? Heaven knows he can’t live nearby or we would have heard about it.”
Amelia had wondered the same. The nearest village was a mile away, but it was little more than a hamlet. If he were a visitor who had come to enjoy Derbyshire’s scenic vistas, he would hardly walk the same route each morning. If he were a newcomer, Amelia would have already heard of his arrival ten times over from her maid and manservant, and Georgiana would have had the news from every neighbor in the parish.
There was another possibility, which was that Pelham Hall had been let. Amelia strongly preferred not to think of that. The entire appeal of this place was its isolation, and a neighbor within walking distance would ruin that. When she had taken this house, the Pelham Hall land agent who handled the transaction in the owner’s absence assured her that the manor was half ruined: quite picturesque but sadly unfit for human habitation. There had been a fire some years earlier, and the place had stood empty and crumbling ever since.
Still, the next day she took a walk up to Pelham Hall to put her mind at ease. The east half of the house stood a blackened ruin, its windows gaping ominously. The west half appeared to be intact, but still desolate. Weeds obscured the gravel drive and ivy grew over the door. There was no sign of anybody having been there recently: no cart tracks, no windows opened for airing, not a single sound other than the birds chirping and the leaves rustling in the wind. Beside her, Nan growled.
“I quite agree,” she told the dog. “Highly unpleasant and unfit for humanity. Thank heavens.”
She returned home, her heart lighter in her chest.
Sadly, morning strolls turned out to be less enjoyable when they were part of a one-sided war of attrition. Amelia considered walking in the evening instead, but it was the summer, and farmers and cottagers were out and about until the sun finally set at nine. Just about the last thing Amelia needed was to stumble upon a courting couple. Roaming about the countryside before dawn or after dusk seemed a good way to break an ankle, not to mention give Georgiana fits from worry. So every morning at her appointed hour, Amelia took her old-fashioned wide-brimmed rush hat off the peg by the door, wrapped herself in a shawl she could remove once the sun began to warm the hillsides, and headed off for a walk as if it weren’t all about to be ruined by the stranger.
Nan, as per her habit, materialized from the stables and began trotting hopefully a few paces behind Amelia. Nan was a mongrel who had liberated herself from the thankless drudgery of herding sheep in order to live off the land. Except that Amelia was almost certain Keating, her manservant, slipped the beast some table scraps, and she wouldn’t be shocked to discover that the dog bedded down by the fire in Keating’s rooms.
As Amelia made her way down the familiar lane, Nan drew closer. While she liked to think that Nan joined her either as protection or out of a sense of adventure, she suspected that the dog thought Amelia was a sheep. Well: fluffy hair, general roundness of form, she supposed she could not blame the dog. Nan seemed to believe that every living creature who got within ten yards of Amelia was a potential sheep rustler.
“I haven’t any bread today,” she said to the dog, who had developed a bizarre fancy for the stale bread Amelia fed to the ducks who gathered at the bend in the brook. “You’re only going to be disappointed later when you realize you’ve wasted your time on me.” Nan looked up at her hopefully. “Fine, then. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Nan barked, startling her out of her thoughts. Amelia looked up, expecting to see that a goose or duck had strayed into the path. But no, it was the giant. And he was standing right in front of her.
Sydney could not quite see the woman’s face beneath the wide brim of her straw hat, but he could see enough to know he was being scowled at. The scowl was in the clench of her fists and the set of her shoulders; the very air around her was thick with her annoyance. Of more pressing concern was the woman’s dog: its hackles were up and it looked about to go for his throat. He had seen her with the dog often enough to know that this seemed to be the dog’s way of letting the world know his mistress was spoken for. Sydney approved in theory, even if in practice he did not much care for the prospect of being eaten. If young women had to walk about the countryside on their own, they ought to have excessively mean dogs with them. There was probably a charitable foundation somewhere whose aim was to pair every snarling cur with a wandering maiden. He would be certain to ask the next time he had to make pained conversation with one of the railway shareholders’ wives. If he ever got back to Manchester, that was.
To that end, he was headed for the village to post a letter. With an aim to dispatching his errand as quickly as possible, he made to step around the woman and her dog, and brought his hand up to tip his hat.
“Don’t you dare,” she snapped. It was the first time he had heard her speak, and he was appalled to hear a plummy English accent. He had thought her a village girl, wearing that plain dress and raggedy hat. But instead she opened her mouth andthatcame out. Good Lord. He tried not to recoil.
