My Unfair Lady (28 page)

   "Summer." She stopped when he called her name, her hand resting on the door frame. He made her name sound like a magic word.

   "Would you really have done it?" he asked.

   "Done what?"

   "Chopped off James's legs."

   Bernard choked from his corner. Summer tried to smile through the wave of exhaustion that threatened to overwhelm her. That doctoring had cost her more than she'd thought. "What do you think?"

   Lionel looked at her, his head cocked to one side, smudges of black lining his cheeks where the tears had run. "I think… I think you've learned to look tough. And that you like animals more than you do people."

   "Sometimes," she whispered as she left the room. "Just sometimes."

   "We'll have to move the cat off the kitchen table," whispered Cook as she held up a padded basket. "Figured this would do for a bed."

   Summer nodded, frowning in thought. With amazement she realized that the cat might survive his ordeal, and that created a whole new set of problems. "When Hunter wakes he'll be in awful pain. Maria and I always had a bit of laudanum on hand. I suppose brandy will have to do."

   Cook tsked and waddled over to the herbs hanging at the edges of the room. "Didn't you wonder how I learned to be such a good helper? It's been a long time since I helped His Grace doctor his animals, but I still remember some things. He always used willow bark for pain… I put it in to soak when I got up this morning. I'll have it ready before the cat wakes." Cook handed her a plate of fried eggs and thick slabs of bacon and honey-smeared toast, before she set the pot of soaked bark on the stove. "I know how to cook, whether it's food or medicine, but never could do the doctoring. It's good to have another in the house."

   "I'm not a doctor; I've just learned to fix things 'cause there was nobody else to do it," said Summer around a mouthful of egg. She thought of Monte, who'd be a real physician someday, and how he got to learn all kinds of fascinating things. But whenever she asked him to share what he knew, he'd told her that she didn't need to know such things, that after they were married she'd be too busy entertaining and raising their children to worry about anything else. At the time she'd felt warm at the thought that someone would finally be taking care of her, but now she wished he'd shared just a bit of what he learned. She could've used it.

   Summer sighed and adjusted the plate of food on her lap, glancing over at the blond head still folded over the table. "The duke never mentioned he had a son." Bernard left the room to do his chores, and Summer looked over at Cook hopefully. "He looks a lot like his pa—father."

   Cook opened the door of the old black stove and tossed in more coal, shaking her head. "How do I explain about the boy?" Her eyes rolled up to the ceiling as if she'd find some answers there. "His Grace was only a boy himself when Widow Plunk's loneliness got the best of her… or maybe she thought of it as an opportunity to better herself, who knows? But when His Grace confronted the old duke with the matter of his illegitimate son's birth, and that he wanted to marry such a low-born woman, he was sent off to school faster'n you could blink. So Widow Plunk raised Lionel in the village, and no one was allowed even to hint that the boy had aristocratic blood runnin' through his veins."

   The pot steamed on the stove, and Cook hovered near it.

   Summer couldn't understand how Byron could ignore his own son. "But when he became a man, didn't he still want to marry the widow and raise his son?"

   "It was too late. She died, you see, and her mother took Lionel in, and His Grace quit doctoring animals after that, and stayed away from Cliffs Castle for a long time."

   The boy murmured something in his sleep, and both women jumped.

   Cook removed the boiling pot from the burner and waved at Summer to follow as she waddled outside, the sun highlighting her gray hair and making shadows in the hollows of her wrinkled face. The older woman began to weed a vegetable garden while Summer walked on toward a fence loaded with a profusion of white late-blooming flowers. She breathed in the sweet aroma, catching the faint salty tang of the sea and the rich mustiness of moist soil. India scampered through the grass, chasing bugs. "How far away is the sea?"

   Cook grunted as she pulled out a long root. "About an hour's walk. Why?"

   "There was coastline in New York, but nothing like the wild cliffs around here, and in Arizona there was very little water, even up in the mountains where my pa mined for ore. England is just so… wet, and green. I want to enjoy it while I'm here."

   "But His Grace said you were to marry." She looked up at Summer with a frown. "You can enjoy it for the rest of your life."

   Summer shook her head, began to pick flower after flower. That ridiculous man! Telling everyone that they'd marry.

   Summer sighed. "Can't he adopt Lionel?"

   Cook didn't bat an eye at the change of subject, being a master at it herself. "The boy would still be illegitimate and could never inherit the title or the estates. And he was happy in the village and wouldn't leave his grandmother, so I guess His Grace thought it best that Lionel stay there. There's some things even I don't ask him about."

   Summer smiled, her arms now filled with flowers, so that she could barely see over the mound. She wondered if flowers always bloomed this late in the season, or if this was an unusual garden. She started toward the kitchen door when Cook's voice stopped her again. "Miss Lee? Ah, I wonder if you could do me just a little favor?"

   "Of course."

   Cook breathed a sigh of relief. "I did something, you see, that maybe I had no right doing, but I sent His Grace a letter, and with him staying with one friend after another, sometimes they don't get to him for months, and when Lionel's grandmother died, well, I had to do something now, didn't I?"

   Summer turned and squatted. "Of course you did."

   "I knew you would help me. You're so different from the rest of the duke's visitors, with their airs and all. And I know my place, don't get me wrong; we're trained from the cradle to respect our proper position in society—"

   "Cook, what did you do?"

   Cook pulled out another weed and tossed it on her growing pile. "I couldn't let the boy stay in that cottage all by himself. So I fixed him up a room in the castle, and he's been here ever since. But I'm not sure what His Grace wanted to do about the boy, and I'm afraid he won't be pleased when he finds out."

   "It's his own
son
, Cook."

   Her pudgy hand reached out and patted Summer's shoulder. "I knew you'd think I'd done right, but as for His Grace…"

   Summer's eyes flashed golden brown, and she rose with her usual unthinking grace. "Don't you worry about it. I'll tell Byron.
That
, and a few other things besides." The older woman grinned so wide that Summer noticed for the first time that her front tooth was chipped almost in half.

   "I'd started to worry about that man," she replied. "What with all his gallivanting and partying and blunt mouth. But now that he's brought you home, I see he's still the same boy that I loved."

   Summer shook her head and stepped over the curly leaves of a lettuce plant. "This isn't my home," she insisted again, still trying to make these deluded people understand that she had no intention of staying here and marrying their duke. She was getting used to her words having little effect, however, and didn't get too riled up when Cook just grinned knowingly at her. Well, let them think what they liked, because as soon as she made sure Byron would take care of his son, she would go back to London and hire someone else to sponsor her.

   Summer blew a bee off one of the flowers in her arms. And darn her insatiable curiosity about the Duke of Monchester. She looked back at the bended figure of Cook. There was something about a garden…

   "Cook, have only you and Bernard been taking care of the castle?"

   "Yes." She took the hem of her apron and wiped sweat off her upper lip. "Why do you ask?"

   "Byron once told me about a Chinese gardener who taught him how to fight. I'd like to meet him."

   Cook frowned. "A Chinaman? Oh, I remember. A small, serene little man. Why, he passed on years ago. Whatever would you want to meet him for?"

   
Because he was so important to Byron,
thought Summer, and then quickly dismissed such a ridiculous notion. "I thought he might teach me how to fight like Byron does." She sighed dejectedly and stepped into the dim coolness of the kitchen, unaware that Cook continued to stare after her, the old woman's mouth opening and closing like a fish out of water.

   Summer tucked some flowers into a large crock and set the rest on a ledge, then noticed that the boy had woke and rubbed his fingers through the cat's fur. She walked over to the table and peered at her patient from over Lionel's shoulder. "He seems to be doing fine."

   The boy spun. "How do you
do
that?"

   She looked at him in confusion. "Do what?"

   "Just suddenly appear, as if out of nowhere?"

   "Oh." India pounced on her shoulder, and she patted the tiny head. "You mean because I fox-walk."

   He looked over at the small fox pup in the corner. "Fox-walk?"

   Summer looked at his pale face, and the sunshine streaming through the door. "My injun friend taught me. Do you want me to show you how?"

   The worry lines smoothed from his face, and he looked like a boy again. "When?"

   "How about now? Don't worry, Hunter will be fine. I'll go get Cook, and she'll watch over him."

   Those vivid blue eyes clouded over, and he began to frown again. "No, I better not leave him."

   Summer knew she couldn't argue with him; she'd felt the same way when she nursed one of her own critters. But he hadn't left Hunter's side for days… She picked up the crock and ran to her room, placing the flowers next to Meg's bed to brighten up the sickroom, and then rummaged through her trunk to the very bottom, and pulled out a package and carefully began to unwrap it. She rubbed the stiffness from the deerskin shirt and leggings, careful not to touch the intricate beadwork that Chatto's mother had so laboriously sewn onto them. Maria would have a fit if she knew that Summer had packed them.

   She changed quickly, sighing with relief when she removed the dreadful corset, tears coming to her eyes when she stood before the mirror in her old hunting clothes. The moccasins slipped on her feet like a second skin, and her hands flew to her hair, pulling out the puffy bun and quickly braiding it into two plaits.

   Over the past few days she'd explored the forest, walked to the sea, and visited with the villagers who welcomed her as easily as Chatto's people had. She couldn't figure out why people of society were so much more difficult for her to fit into, and why she couldn't be as comfortable in London or New York as she was here. She sighed and pulled at the sleeves of the buckskin. They were shorter than she remem bered, but she'd been a young girl and had grown a bit since then. But not much.

   Grateful that Meg hadn't woken up to see her in her buckskins, she smiled a wicked grin as she slung the quiver of arrows over her back and looped her bow over her shoulder and flew down the stairs, the absence of swishing skirts and heeled boots allowing her to be as silent as a ghost. Summer stepped into the kitchen doorway. It took several minutes for them to notice her. Cook glanced up and dropped the spoon in her hand, clutching at her chest. Bernard choked on his cup of tea. Lionel stared as if she were indeed a ghost.

"THESE WERE A GIFT FROM THE BE-DON-KO-HE Apache." The boy's mouth opened, and Summer could see all the questions in his eyes and suppressed a grin of triumph. "I'll bring home dinner, Cook. I haven't been hunting in ages."

   The woman just nodded.

   "But," stammered Lionel, "you don't have a gun."

   Summer padded to the open door. "I have other weapons."

   "But, but how…"

   Summer went out the door.

   "Cook," asked Lionel, "can you watch over Hunter for me?"

   "Of course, young master. He's on the mend now—no need for you to worry."

   He stepped toward the sunshine, then turned back. "You'll call me if he wakes? I want to be with him when he wakes up."

   Cook and Bernard glanced at each other with a knowing grin.

   "I'll bang a spoon on the big kettle loud enough for the whole of Norfolk to hear," Cook assured him.

   He sprinted out the door, catching up to Summer with a burst of questions. "Can you really hunt with a bow? Everybody uses guns. What are those clothes made of? Is that what real Indians wear? How did you…"