Vexed, page 20
But Harry looked as if sermons would be of little interest to him—he was eyeing the shifting crowd from under the brim of his hat, his gaze scanning faces, as if he were looking for someone. As if he were trying to find a friend.
She could be that friend. And so much more.
Nessa swallowed her nervous misgivings and forced her voice to an unstudied, casual tone. “Would you be so kind as to do me the favor of starting off the apple bobbing? It would be a grand thing to have Captain Lord Harry Beck take part in the Allantide fête.” There, she had asked, even if her heart began thudding in her ears like the waves against the rocks along the coast.
“Ah, well—” He looked not exactly skeptical, but as if he were thinking of a way to get out of it. “Isn’t this for the youngsters?”
“Aye.” She cleared the lump of awkwardness from her throat. “But I need someone whom I know won’t cheat to show the lads how it’s properly done.”
“Ah. I never cheat. Hands behind the back, isn’t it?”
Nessa belatedly realized that his injury might make the balance of such a posture difficult. She’d let him do whatever he wanted if it meant he would take a chance with her apple. That’s all she wanted, all she could ask for—this one chance.
“Oh, Harry. You can put your hands wherever you like.”
Chapter 4
The moment the words were out of her mouth, heat swept across Nessa’s face, so hot it all but left scorch marks upon her cheekbones. “I mean— I didn’t mean—”
But Harry winked at her, just the way he used to do over the top of his Latin grammar book. “What interesting rules you’ve thought up, Nessa.”
And just like that, she was shot through anew with all the hopeless, helpless, rapturous delight of her youthful infatuation—that peculiar, familiar ache that rose within her at the very mention of his name. At the sight of his face. At the thought of his pain.
He was such a man. Such a kind, thoughtful, beautiful man. The best man in all of England. In all the world. How had she survived twelve long years without once having the benefit and boon of his smile?
Not particularly well—Nessa could feel the accumulated years of loneliness press upon her like the preserved butterfly specimens in her father’s study, pinned under glass.
But her reverie on a theme of all things Harry had kept her from noticing the small knot of younger maidens from the village who had been standing out of Nessa’s line of vision, darting forward to add their apples to the tub. They were all clearly hoping for the same as she—that handsome Lord Harry Beck would pick their apple and fall under their spell instead of hers.
And there was nothing Nessa could do to prevent it. She could only slip her own marked apple into the tub along with the rest and hope for the best. Hope that her tiny apple could hold a much larger enchantment. Hope her enchantment would work the strongest spell, so she could finally learn to release the breath she seemed to have been holding for twelve long years.
And then she really did hold her breath when Captain Lord Harry muttered what sounded like a very blue curse and simply plunged his head into the vat, chasing an apple all the way to the very bottom of the barrel. And then he came up with a splash and spray of water whipping off his hair and a bright red apple clenched between his straight, white teeth.
A cry of delight and a smattering of applause went up from the small crowd that had gathered and Nessa clapped along with them. And then she stopped clapping. She stopped breathing.
Because the apple between his teeth was a small, perfectly rounded, perfectly polished Pendragon Red with her feathered arrow sign carved next to the stem—she could see it clear as day right next to his lip, where he held his prize in his teeth for all to see.
It had worked—the enchantment was as powerful as she ever might have hoped. More powerful that she ever might have dreamed.
Something more powerful than hope bloomed within her chest, hot and intoxicating and strong. The apple was hers. He would be hers.
All she had to do was step forward and tell him. Tell him the mark was hers. And then take a bite of the apple herself, twining the enchantment between them so he could fall in love with her. Finally, now and forever.
“La,” someone breathed behind her. “But that’s my apple, Lord Harry.”
“No!” The denial leapt from her mouth just as Elowen Gannett stepped out of the small crowd with a look of perfect astonishment on her round, pink face.
“I beg your pardon. I did not know I oughtn’t have taken it, Miss…?” Lord Harry smiled in his lovely, kind way and waited patiently for Elowen to supply her name.
But Elowen was too overcome with the excitement and improbability of the moment to speak sensibly. It was up to Nessa to salvage something of the truth from the moment, without savaging poor Elowen, whose only sin was being a trifle silly and dim, and rather too apt to jump to the wrong conclusion. “If my lord pleases, it’s Elowen Gannett, sir. Her father is Squire Gannett, whose lands lie south of the village. Elowen, Lord Henry, Captain Beck.”
“Sir.” The dark-haired lass blinked her wide golden eyes, and curtseyed as if to the king himself. “You picked my apple.”
“I think you might be mistaken, Elowen.” Nessa tried to think of some kind way of showing her the mark, of correcting the simple mistake without being cruel.
But Elowen was well on her way to working herself into unreasoning raptures. “Aye, ’tis mine. ’Tis! He picked it, he did. You saw, didn't you?” Her voice rose, breathless with excitement, and her face flushed with hectic color as she turned to the onlookers in appeal. “You saw!”
She held out her hand. And there was nothing Nessa could do but watch helplessly as Harry handed the apple to Elowen, who instantly put the ripe red fruit right up to her own mouth, and sank her teeth into the soft flesh, biting off the little mark Nessa had so carefully carved into the skin, chewing and swallowing Nessa’s last best hope.
Taking the enchantment all into herself. And destroying forever Nessa’s bright chance at her dream.
Harry looked at the pleasant young woman who stepped forward with expectation shining from her fair face and tried to keep the confusion from showing on his own. He had evidently chosen her apple, though just what such a choice signified, he was not exactly sure. He had only one strong boyhood memory of Allantide, which was of hot wax falling painfully into his eyes. And sweet, awkward, earnest Nessa Teague solemnly kissing his closed lids to take away the stinging pain.
Well, damn his eyes. However had he forgotten that?
A second memory followed hard on the first—of his father’s cousin, the old Earl Banfield, inviting Harry up to the castle for tea and sticky cakes. Of the earl, sitting in his dark library and asking in his grave, calm manner about Harry’s studies at the manse, and how he was getting on, and was vicar teaching him anything else besides mathematics? Harry remembered being unable to answer, because all he had been able to recall to mind that day had been Nessa and that strange, solemn, sweet kiss.
But Nessa Teague was not kissing him now—she was staring at the Gannett girl as if she had been struck dumb, like a concussed gunner gone mute in the heat of battle. What a strange thought—he was in peaceful, rural Cornwall, not on a frigate of war at sea. And Nessa Teague, however earnest, was far too fey for a gunner.
But whatever it was he was to do, Harry pledged himself to submit to it manfully. He shook off the disappointment that this elfin Gannett girl was leading him away from tall, earnest Nessa, who mouthed, “Be careful,” as he was led away.
Careful of what, he could not yet say, but he was grateful for the warning—the Gannett girl did seem somehow dangerous, though she did nothing but cling to his arm and tow him through the crowd. But unlike Nessa Teague, this girl looked as if she had…expectations.
He was clearly sailing in treacherous waters.
The instinct that had seen him safety through twelve years at the receiving end of French cannon had him politely but firmly detaching the attractive little barnacle from his person. “I’m afraid I can’t give you my arm, Miss Gannett, as I’ve been injured.” He wielded the compass-topped cane as if it were a weapon. Which it was—a weapon against presumption.
“Injured?” Miss Gannett blinked at him. “La, you’d think they’d take more care with a marquess’ son.”
Devil take him. Even without the uniform, he was known to be the Marquess of Halesworth’s son—no wonder she found him, as they said in the navy, a ready target. “Miss Gannett, in the heat of battle, the cannonballs don’t give a blazing damn whose son I am.”
A shocked hand flew up to cover her petite, bee-stung lips. “Gracious me!”
Damn his eyes for a navy man. “I beg your pardon, Miss Gannett. Please forgive my rough manners. I’ve been at sea in the company of men too long.”
His apology brought back her tremulous smile. “But you came back just in time for Allantide.”
“Yes.” He answered out of politeness, for he was distracted by the sight of Matthew Kent, milling through the crowd and looking only slightly less disreputable than the other day, wearing a woolen smock that marked him as fisherfolk. Kent briefly met Harry’s eye, and then looked meaningfully at a portly fellow in an old-fashioned tricorn hat holding forth next to a cider keg.
“And your family, Miss Gannettt? There was an old Squire Gannettt in my youth who used to chase us out of his orchard if we dared to try and pilfer some windfalls, but it’s been a number of years. Might he have been a relation?”
Miss Gannettt appeared to have no head for ancestry. “That’s my father, the Squire, there.” She pointed to the garrulous man at the cider tap.
Excellent—the enemy was sighted. “I’d like to meet him, if I may?”
“Naturally,” was Miss Gannettt’s happy response as she slipped through the circle of men surrounding her father. “Da, there’s someone I want you to meet.”
The squire looked down his red nose at Harry, even though he had to tip his head up to do so. “Oo’s this then, Elly?”
“It’s Lord Harry, from up the castle,” Elowen Gannettt supplied.
“Captain Harry Beck, Squire Gannettt.” Harry made his own introduction. He’d rather be known for the rank he’d earned for himself, rather than as one of the Marquess of Halesworth’s spare sons. “A pleasure to meet you.”
“You’re the navy lad then?” The squire was a blunt country man, hard to impress. “Thought you’d’a been killed or summat.”
“Very near to, Squire.” Harry chose not to take exception, but to make himself as agreeable as Matthew Kent might like. He patted his thigh and gestured to his cane. “Those Frenchies tried their damnedest.”
The assembled men broke into howling guffaws, but the squire remained unimpressed. “And ‘ow do you know our Elly, then?” he demanded.
“Oh, you’ll never believe, Da.” Elowen Gannettt clutched her father’s sleeve, eager to tell. “He bobbed for my apple that I slept with under my pillow last eve and marked with my own hand.” She turned her beaming smile upon Harry. “And he picked it, in front of everyone. Everyone saw. And now he’s mine. We’re good as engaged.”
Chapter 5
“Devil take it, no.” The denial was out of Harry’s mouth before Miss Gannettt’s high, excited voice had faded from hearing. And then there was silence—ominous silence as the crowd of men drew back as one.
“You sayin’ you din’t pick my girl’s apple?” The words fell from the squire’s lips like stones.
“No.” Harry straightened his spine, consciously taking the stance he adopted on the quarterdeck of a ship—head high, eyes blazing. “I am not disputing my actions, only your very kind daughter’s interpretation of them. I meant no disrespect—I mean none now—but I did not mean to offer marriage.”
“Everyone knows what picking an Allantide apple means.” The squire was adamant.
“Not everyone.” Harry didn’t. Or if he once had, he’d forgotten. Another casualty of living in harm’s way for twelve long years—his memories were too crowded with dangerous episodes to admit more than a glimpse or two at the golden, tranquil years he’d had before.
Funny that his only memory of Allantide had been of solemn, earnest Nessa.
“Elly sez yer good as engaged, means yer engaged.” The squire jutted his bulldog jaw close to Harry’s. “If’n I decide to give mine approval.”
Harry most devoutly hoped the squire would not give his approval. And since Harry was not the sort of man to simply sit and wait for the squire to withhold his approval, he began immediately to work to bring about such a profitable conclusion, though Harry wasn’t one to lie, or act dishonorably, or allow himself to utter unkind things about the lady—who seemed to be taking his conversation with her father quite placidly, as if she had no doubt of their marriage coming to pass. “My father’s approval would also be necessary.”
It was not quite a lie—although Harry was only a spare son and, therefore, of lesser importance, he doubted his father would delight in allying himself with this blunt-spoken, potentially traitorous, country squire.
Who eyed Harry with the same animal inspection he might give his prized pig. “We’ll see about that.”
Harry promptly changed tack. “I don’t suppose you’ll want a crippled younger son without any influence or career prospects as a future son-in-law. I’ve done with the navy, you see.” He held up the cane. “Invalided out. Nothing to do now but drink my way across the countryside.” He smiled encouragingly to the fellow manning the cider tap.
“Don’t want no drunk as mine son-in-law.” The squire cast a quelling eye over both Harry and the tap man.
“No,” Harry agreed cheerfully. “It seems no one does.”
At that, the squire took up his daughter’s arm and hustled her away like a prize heifer—or perhaps something more delicate, like a tender veal calf—and the squire’s cronies suddenly found other things that required their attention, carefully taking the cider keg with them.
Pretend drunkenness had its drawbacks as well as its benefits.
Harry took up his cane and wandered indirectly in Matthew Kent’s direction, beneath the shelter of a huge beech tree shading the sloping town common.
“You seem to be having an interesting morning,” Kent observed when Harry moored up a few feet away from him against the stone fence ringing the common.
“Aye,” Harry answered. “I seem to have shoaled myself rather badly on this rock coast of yours.”
“Have a glass of ale and tell me your tale of woe.”
“Good man.” Harry accepted the pint Kent handed him. “It seems I’ve gone and gotten myself engaged, or some fool thing, without rightly knowing how.”
“Well, if you don’t know how it’s done—” Kent’s mouth twisted up in a wry smile. “But let me be the first to wish you happy.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I can’t possibly marry the girl. I didn’t offer for her—I don’t even know her. It’s some fool thing to do with the apples—Allan apples. I’d forgotten.”
“You’ve been away too long,” Kent repeated.
“Aye.” In more ways than he knew.
“So who’s the lucky lass?” Kent asked between sips at his own tankard. “Bound to be Nessa Teague, I reckon, or her alarmingly piquant sister.”
“Nessa Teague?” The point of something perilously close to alarm harpooned its way through his chest, propelling him to his feet. “Why would you say that?”
“Saw you talking to her,” Kent reasoned. “A family of only girls, opening a school to take in only boys. The vicar has to be mad. Or have something else in mind.” Kent squinted at the clergyman in question, who was holding forth next to the cake tent. “But if not one of the Teague sisters, then whom?”
“My intended? Miss Elowen Gannettt.”
Kent let out a low whistle that ended on a chuckle. “Should’ha warned you about that one. Gormless but lethal, that girl. A pigeon ripe for the plucking, our Elly.”
“Then why do I feel like the one who is in danger of being plucked?”
“Because you’re not stupid. What did you think of the squire?”
“He’s a blunt instrument,” was Harry’s opinion.
“I’d like you to find out more about him.” Kent’s gaze constantly roved over the assemblage, like a sailing master squinting his weather eye to the sky in expectation of rain.
Harry followed Kent’s example, keeping his eyes on the common, even with unease clawing its way up his throat. “Is there no one else who knows the village and countryside, not to mention the coast, better than I?”
“No one else is at present engaged to the squire’s daughter. You can be a blameless cipher coming round, asking your nosy questions for the purpose of the marriage settlements.”
Harry’s cravat strangled up as tight as a noose. “You can’t think that I’ll need to go so far as marriage settlements?”
“I hope not, for your sake.” Harry could hear the smile in Kent’s voice, even while he watched the common. “I don’t imagine your father, the marquess, will take kindly to the squire, and vice versa.”
“You’re enjoying this.”
“I am,” Kent agreed. “And I’ll enjoy it more when you find out everything you can about Squire Gannettt, his business and his friends.”
“You think he’s your traitor?”
“Don’t rightly know.” Kent shifted, checking that their conversation wasn’t being overheard. “And I don’t rightly know how the treason plays in with the smuggling. The problem is that everyone is in on the trade, from the squire up the coast, down to the dimwitted mute who lives below the dock, and back up to the vicar’s manse upon the village hill.”
“Surely not the vicar?” What sort of man of God would be mixed up in a smuggling ring?
“The Reverend Mr. Teague likes his brandy.”
