“‘Certainly father, and whose wife shall I take?”’ Deb finished the quotation. ‘Precisely, my lord. Some rakes never reform.’
Richard released her hand slowly. ‘So you think you have my measure, Mrs Stratton? We shall see. Goodnight. I shall look forward to our next meeting.’
Deb gave him an arctic look. ‘I doubt that shall be soon, Lord Richard.’
Richard raised his brows expressively. ‘Do you? Then perhaps you do not have my measure after all.’ He nodded pleasantly to Olivia and strolled away.
Olivia, neglecting her other guests out of sheer curiosity, saw her sister to the door.
‘What on earth was that all about, Deb?’ she demanded.
‘That,’ Deb said, pulling on her gloves, and noting that her hands were shaking slightly, ‘was about Lord Richard Kestrel and his disgraceful behaviour, Liv. Can you not ban the man from your house?’
‘Not really,’ Olivia said, taking her literally. ‘He is a friend of Ross’s after all. But, Deb…surely he cannot have behaved disgracefully twice in a single day?’
‘I fear so,’ Deb said.
‘You fear so? What can there be about his behaviour to make you fearful, Deb?’
Deb paused, looking at the tiny pinpoints of stars that pricked the autumn sky. ‘It is myself I fear, not Lord Richard,’ she said slowly. ‘He makes me feel so-’
She stopped, shrugged abruptly and continued in her normal voice, ‘I can scarce be the first lady to be in danger of letting her heart rule her head in the matter of Lord Richard Kestrel.’
As the carriage trundled down the lane to Mallow House, Deb thought about Richard Kestrel. He had said that she was safe from seduction, and yet there was more than one way to seduce a lady. It could be done so subtly that the lady in question might not notice until it was almost too late. Her defences were undermined, her emotions engaged. It seemed to Deb that she had known Richard Kestrel for an age and yet suddenly all her preconceived notions of him were being challenged and her prejudices tumbling. She had started to let him close to her. And now that he was close, there was no way on earth that he would let her escape him. It was the most perilous thing that she could have done.
Chapter Four
L ord Richard Kestrel had been reading the Suffolk Chronicle with extreme attention for the past three days. It was a newspaper that previously he had dismissed as tiresomely provincial in its outlook. Generally speaking, he preferred to have his newspapers delivered directly from London. Now, however, he pored over every page of the Chronicle. His curiosity-and much else-was aroused. What was the communication that Mrs Stratton had sent to the editor of the Chronicle? He had scanned the letters page to no avail, had waded his way through endless advertisements for Doctor Solomon’s Cordial Balm of Gilead and was losing the will to live over the countless reports of agricultural sales at Woodbridge market.
Then, on the third morning after Olivia Marney’s musicale, he found it. His eye was caught by a small notice at the bottom of page six, wedged in between an advert for the erection of a patented thrashing machine and a notice about a zoological collection that boasted a one horned rhinoceros.
A lady requires the assistance of a gentleman. If any gentleman of honour, discretion and chivalry will venture to answer this notice and despatch a reply to Lady Incognita at the Bell and Steelyard Inn, Woodbridge, Suffolk, then he shall have no reason to repent his generosity.
A small smile curled Lord Richard’s mouth as he considered the identity of Lady Incognita. Could she be none other than the utterly infuriating, utterly entrancing Deborah Stratton? And if so, what assistance did she require from her discreet gentleman? Richard’s mind was positively boggling.
There was only one way to find out, of course. Richard went across to the inlaid cherry-wood desk in the window and extracted a pen and an inkhorn from the top left-hand drawer. Sitting down, he pulled the paper towards him and started to write.
‘Mrs Lester tells me that the cellars have flooded again,’ Mrs Aintree said, over breakfast that morning. ‘One of the hams your brother-in-law sent over is quite ruined and the case of wine you laid down is under water.’
‘The duck decoy must be blocked again,’ Deb said. She was eating a buttered egg with one hand and turning the pages of the Suffolk Chronicle with the other whilst she scanned the advertisements. ‘I will go and take a look after breakfast.’
‘Could you not send to Marney for the gamekeeper to come?’ Mrs Aintree suggested, the very slightest edge to her tone. ‘It is scarce appropriate for you to be grubbing about in the undergrowth; indeed, it could be positively dangerous.’
Deb laughed. ‘Dangerous? The duck decoy? I doubt there is more than a foot of water in it and the ducks are scarcely threatening creatures.’
‘That was not what I meant,’ Mrs Aintree said severely. ‘When are you going to stop behaving like a hoyden, Deborah? Although your father is quite wrong to try and coerce you into marriage, I do believe that the fundamental idea might be of value. With a proper home and family of your own-’
Something like a shaft of pain wedged itself in Deborah’s breast and she pushed the remains of the egg aside. ‘I have a home here, Clarrie,’ she said. She folded the newspaper and stood up. ‘Pray excuse me. I shall take a quick look at the pond to see if the sluices are jammed and then I shall send to Ross for assistance.’
As a concession to propriety, Deb went to fetch her bonnet and spencer before venturing out. Neither was strictly necessary in the functional sense, since no one was going to see her and the weather was still mild. She eschewed wearing gloves, but made sure that she tucked her hands out of sight as she passed the breakfast room window. She did not want Mrs Aintree ringing a peal over her for inappropriate dress.
It felt pleasant to be out in the fresh air. Deb had not slept particularly well for the last few nights, the ones that had followed the musicale, and she did not wish to dwell on the reasons why. When Mrs Aintree had mentioned marriage and a home of her own, Deb’s thoughts had-ludicrously-swung to Lord Richard Kestrel for a brief moment before she had depressed her own hopes and dreams stillborn. That way lay madness. She had no wish to remarry and, even if she had, her choice would scarcely fall on a man whose reckless charm reminded her all too forcibly of her first, perfidious husband. It was yet another reason why she required a temperate, biddable man to be her pretend fiance. She was done with rakes.
The duck decoy was tucked away at the bottom of Mallow’s overgrown garden near the bridge across the track to Midwinter Bere. Deb knew that Olivia shuddered each time she saw the runaway shrubbery and neglected flowerbeds, but Deb had no money to spare for luxuries such as gardening and too much pride to ask Ross to fund anything other than the most basic of maintenance. The previous owner of Mallow had been a keen sportsman who had even imported a specially trained dog from Holland to hunt ducks with him. He had kept the decoy in good condition, but these days the traps were broken and the bushes that had been planted to shield the pond from the wind had all but gone wild. The ducks splashed happily in the decoy, knowing that they were safer there than on the river. When Deb arrived on the bank they set up a loud squawking and scattered into the undergrowth.
Deb pushed her way through the tangle of shrubs and reached the end of pond, where a sluice gate was supposed to regulate the flow of water out under the bridge and into the Winter Race. Two years before, the sluices had blocked during heavy rains and it was then that the problem with the cellars had first become apparent. In this instance it seemed more a case of neglect than anything else. Deb could see that, during the past summer, grasses had seeded themselves around the sluice gate and the overhanging twigs and branches had grown through the gaps, completely jamming the gate. She pulled half-heartedly at some of the deep-rooted grasses. A little of the soil tumbled from the bank, but the weeds refused to shift. Gardening was not Deb’s occupation of choice, so she dusted her hands down on her skirts and straightened up, almost banging her head on an overhanging branch. She would have to ask Ross to send the Marney gardeners over to clear the decoy before the whole area became choked with weeds and the first proper rains of the winter caused more damage. Sometimes she hated to be dependent on Ross’s charity, but it could not be helped. She could not do the work herself.
It was as Deb was struggling back towards the path, her skirts snagging on brambles and the low branches
