An Unforgettable Rogue (24 page)

The solicitor sat forward. “In asylums, in workhouses, everywhere, there is greed, cruelty, evils I will not name; I doubt you know of their existence. But every once in a while, I come across a person of caring and compassion. The man who raised me was such a man. I believe that you are such a woman.”

He held her gaze. “But you must understand what I want, nay, demand of you, and why. You must know, clearly, right from wrong, and teach those precepts to the children. Only in that way can you nurture them properly.”

Chastity considered the workhouse, where children died daily. She did know right from wrong, and leaving Matt, Mark, Luke and Bekah in the workhouse would be wrong.

“If I find that you have acted in other than a moral, conscientious or lawful manner,” Mr. Sennett had continued. “You will lose Sunnyledge, and I will see that you never open a home for children, anywhere, ever.”

Chastity’s heart had raced then; it raced now. She
had
acted conscientiously and morally by telling the parish she would raise the children. Taking them would have been legal, but for a corrupt church elder who had sent them to the workhouse because she would not pay his
price
.

All would be well, she reassured herself now as they continued their trek. No man, save one, knew what she had done, and that man, she would never see, again.

Chastity told herself, over and over again, that she had done the right thing, as they continued on and the landscape changed. Clustered cottages gave way to sprawling farms. Grasslands, divided by dry stone walls, became hilly uplands. Hillocks grew forested; roads narrowed.

By the time the valley before them revealed the jaunty jumble of structures, requisite to bustling village life, dusk streaked the sky with lavender. “This is it,” Chastity said her sense of destiny so intense, a
frisson
of alarm stepped on its heels. “Painswick.”

By virtue of the steep cobbled track descending into the village, the children gamboled headlong hand in hand, Luke laughing all the way.

Amid hawkers’ songs and hot, spicy scents, Chastity admired a bonnet placed in a shop window by a barrel-bellied, frock-coated merchant. “Two pounds, three? That’s highway robbery,” she said.

Luke shifted the bag containing their clothes and William’s medical supplies and tugged at her sleeve. “I’m gonna buy that for you someday, Kitty.” As she bent to kiss his cheek, he ruffled her hair, freeing the powder she had used to drear its chestnut hue, which made her sneeze.

After buying food and supplies, she bought her giggling band them each a ha-penny pie and a peppermint stick for less than a thruppence.  They ate while they watched the village children roll misshapen hoops in the wheelwright’s dooryard.

Afterward, Chastity sought directions to Sunnyledge.

“Oh my, no,” said a buxom matron, all agog. “Not that God-forsaken place. It’s haunted, don’t’cha know. Many’s the night they’ve heard her pitiful wail, that lost soul searching for her missing babes. They died with her, some say, but their wee bodies were never buried.”

Chastity held Bekah closer. “If you could direct us.”

The matron shook her head. “If you insist.” She pointed. “There it is, top ‘o the hill.”

A honey-gold manse stood guarding the valley, its chimneystacks straight as parade soldiers at full attention. Mullioned windows—as tall as the first floor, and wide as they were tall—reflected the sun as bright as that off the stone itself.

“It’s a bloomin’ castle,” Matt said.

“Magic,” whispered Luke.

Mark snorted. “Where our dreams will come true.”

“Splendid,” Chastity said. “As if it’s made of gold.”

“That’s the sun on the stone—Painswick stone. The old Earl’s dead. That’s his house. You kin?”

“If you could tell me how to get there.”

“Go left at the row of yews and take the hill straight up. Been abandoned for years. Except for a daft caretaker, now and again, most won’t go near the place.”

Chastity gave her thanks and they went on their way, but the villager followed. “It’s farther than you think. You got a key? Can’t get in, if you don’t have a key.”

Chastity kept walking.

“You’re braver than I would be,” the tenacious woman called from a distance a moment later.

Luke blew his shepherd’s horn that Chastity had saved for him. WARRONNK!

Mr. Sennett was right. Boys were noisy. She would never be able to thank the solicitor for giving her the use of Sunnyledge—though if he ever found out that she rescued the children
after
he set down his rules ... The possible consequences of her actions made Chastity shudder, even as Rebekah began to wail.

“How old is Bekah?” Chastity asked.

“Three ‘cept we dunno’ when we’re gonna’ be the next number,” Luke said.

“Don’t mind that noise she makes,” Matt said. “She does that lots. Wish she would talk, though.”

“She’s dumb.”

“That will be enough, Mark,” Chastity said, coming to a faltering stop. Sunnyledge may have looked warm and inviting from the vale, but up close, after dark, it looked decidedly bleak, forsaken, and forbidding.

The key was useless. A mere nudge opened the door, the wind taking it the rest of the way. With the children attached to her skirts, Chastity stepped inside, stifling a nervous urge to giggle. “Hello? Is anyone here?”

WARRONNNK!

Chastity shrieked and fell against the door, her hand to her fast-pumping heart. “That will be enough horn-blowing for now, Luke. Anyone here has expired from fright by now.”

Chastity tried to lock the door, but the keyhole turned with the key, so she pushed a chair against it, cutting off the last sliver of moonlight. “Bother, I am such an idiot. I do not even have a candle.”

“I can see in the dark,” Matt said. “We hid in Aunt Anna’s cellar so long after she died, we never saw the sun.”

“Do you think you can find the kitchen?”

“I’m good at finding things. Be right back.”

Chastity sat on the floor, Bekah, Mark, and Luke, cozy and warm, nesting in her black wool skirts. For once, she was glad William had not seen fit to replace her religious habits during their short marriage. She had, however, removed all symbols of her religious life, so that her gowns looked like proper widow’s weeds.

“Found the kitchen, Kitty. And candles,” Matt called.

A short while later, the children ate some of the bread and cheese she’d bought, as exhaustion overtook them, and a sense of destiny, profound and peaceful, enveloped Chastity.

Settled for the night with Zeke, their lame rabbit, on a mattress plumped with Chastity’s aprons and nightshifts, one old habit and one Sunday best, Luke said they hadn’t been so comfy since Mum left.

“I was worried,” Matt said with a yawn. “That you wouldn’t come for us at the workhouse, like you promised.”

Mark scoffed and rolled to his side, presenting his rigid back. “We would never have gone to that horrid old place, if you hadn’t turned us in.”

If she failed to breach that barrier Mark kept erected around his heart, Chastity worried that it would become as hard as the stone in these Cotswold hills.

How could he be so angry, yet cuddle his baby sister so lovingly? Perhaps this child, who professed to need no one, needed her even more than his brothers and sister did. One thing was certain; Mark would never forgive her for trying to gain their custody through the proper channels first.

After she buried William, Chastity had gone on to his Aunt Anna’s without him. There, she found that his aunt had died, leaving his young cousins, abandoned at her passing, hiding in her cellar to keep from getting separated or going to the workhouse.

Chastity had marched them to the Vicar to say she would take them. The Vicar passed her to the Curate, the Curate to the Beadle.

Chastity shuddered remembering the Beadle’s lustful suggestion as to how she could purchase them. Since she refused to pay his price, however, the Beadle had relegated the children to the parish workhouse with nary a blink.

So much for following the rules, Chastity thought, unable to forget Mr. Sennett’s words, “If I find that you have acted in other than a moral, conscientious or lawful manner, you will lose Sunnyledge, and I will see that you never open a refuge for children anywhere, ever.”

Chastity thought of the workhouse, where children younger than hers, died. She remembered the baby girl born the week she worked there trying to get hers back, how much she’d wanted to take the babe as well. She thought of Matt’s protectiveness, Mark’s anger, Luke’s trust, and Bekah’s cough....

In taking them, she had acted conscientiously and morally. Except for the Beadle’s lust, her guardianship would be lawful as well.

Mr. Sennett had told her that he tried to bring the conditions of asylums and workhouses to the notice of people who could improve them, but their lack of response angered him.

“Do you never get so incensed,” Chastity had dared to ask, knowing she planned to rescue William’s cousins the next day, “that you wish to take matters into your own hands?”

“We cannot give in to such,” he said. “To have lasting effect, reform must be undertaken in a lawful, orderly manner. There is
never
an excuse to breach rules.”

Chastity sighed. Having been an orphan, the solicitor lauded her wish to open a home where children without parents would be loved. She only hoped that he would come to understand that taking these few had been necessary.

She bent to them now—warm, safe, unafraid, bellies full—covered a shoulder, stroked a brow, and prayed, for their sakes, that all would be well.

Then she sat to take down her hair, as she examined the kitchen, aglow from a fire in the old stone hearth.

Sunnyledge—a haven—someday perhaps, a home.

The hell of it was, Reed Gilbride thought, rubbing the back of his neck, looking up at Sunnyledge, the house was so damned big, he could search for years and never find the truth of his birth. As for secrets, the place fairly reeked of them.

Even the cryptic note he had received added to Sunnyledge’s aura of mystery—the note that roused in him an anger, tempered oddly by hope. Such anger, he usually reserved for the people who gave him life and threw him away. And the hope? Well, that just made him madder, until Sennett killed expectation by saying that the note must be a hoax. The solicitor said that he had seen more than one, worded exactly the same way. He also suggested that a Barrington by-blow had no claim here.

Still, Reed could not give up. As a child, he would have settled for knowing who his parents
might
have been. Now he bloody well wanted to know
why
he had not been good enough for them to keep. Who gave away a child at its birth to the Gilbrides, of all people?

He led his horse around back to find it shelter.

Why did the woman who raised him—if you could call it that—refuse to talk about Sunnyledge? Why act as if the devil would swallow her whole, if she did?
Could
this place hold the key to his past? Him, the Earl of Barrington, as the note suggested?

Leaving the horse in a rickety old stable, Reed mocked himself with a laugh as he pulled up his collar against the cold drizzle, returned to the entrance he had found, and picked up his satchel. He might be a bastard in more ways than one, but with or without Sennett’s approval, he needed to find out.

Now that Boney had been defeated, and he’d retired from the Guards, Reed looked forward to a life of peace and quiet, and the occasional willing woman. But first he must search for his roots, this being the place to start.

“Damn, it’s cold.” Almost as if fate heard, a blast of wind and rain conspired to smack him in the face, and open the door with a flourish—the thunderous crack of it hitting the wall loud enough to wake the Sunnyledge ghost herself.

Reed saluted and stepped inside, a sense of inevitability filling him, as if he had arrived after a thirty-year sojourn, turned an invisible corner, and could not return the way he had come.

What was more, he did not want to.

In the kitchen, Chastity had heard a loud, grating sound and shot to her feet. After a heart-pounding, frozen moment, her arms and legs prickling, she located a meat cleaver in a kitchen drawer and closed her trembling fingers around its smooth bone handle.

End of the Beginning

Bio: Annette Blair

A National Bestselling author for Penguin Books, Annette Blair left her day job as a Development Director and Journalism Advisor at a private New England prep school to become a full time writer. At thirty-five books and counting, she’s added Contemporary Cozy Mysteries and Bewitching Romantic comedies to her award-winning, Regency, Victorian, and Amish Historical Romances.

Happily married to her grammar school nemesis, Annette considers romance a celebration of life. Besides creating new stories, she loves hearing from her readers, antiquing, and collecting 19
^th
century glass slippers.

Contact her at:

www.annetteblair.com

https://www.facebook.com/annette.blair.author

http://twitter.com/annetteblair

Awards and Accolades:

UNFORGETTABLE ROGUE

2003 Booksellers Best Award Winner

2003 Laurel Wreath Award Winner, VCRW

2003 Orange Rose Finalist, Orange County RWA

2003 Aspen Gold Finalist, HODRW

2003 Blue Boa Award of Excellence Winner, The Peninsular Chapter RWA

2002 Romantic Times K.I.S.S. Award, Knight In Shining Silver, RT