Marianne thought he over-sheltered the children. For months after Catriona’s death, he had barely been able to bring himself to leave for work in the mornings, not wanting to let what remained of his family out of his sight.
Miss Arden looked at him with sympathy. “Of course. I see. I should hope you would not find unfriendly people here. Golowan is a cheerful celebration and welcoming to visitors. I do think your children would enjoy it.”
“I’ll consider it. Will you attend?”
Her mouth opened, as if in surprise, and then she laughed, shaking her head. “No. Unlike you I am not a stranger here, and I suspect most people would prefer that I make myself one.”
“Ah. I’m sorry.” His own mother had faced the disapproval of the town where he’d been raised, having borne two children to an English lord who kept her as his mistress in a house near his shooting estate. Adam knew how the whispers and looks had pained her, though she’d always pretended that they hadn’t.
“Oh, that’s quite all right,” Miss Arden said. Her expression hardened into something like that detached gaze she’d worn when he’d disappointed her on her terrace. “I take comfort from the fact that the dislike is mutual.”
He didn’t quite believe her. It had been clear enough to him last night that she acted more impervious than she really was. And he couldn’t blame her. No one liked to wear their pain openly.
Before he could say anything more, Miss Tompkins walked through the kitchen door, carrying a basket.
“You’re back,” Miss Arden said. “How was the village?”
Tompkins grimaced and held up a piece of paper. “This was posted by the gates to the house,” she said acidly. “The fence is covered in them.”
Miss Arden’s face went pale. “They wasted little time.”
Adam leaned over to inspect the paper. It bore Miss Arden’s image, but whoever had drawn it had made her face hawkish and her figure a grotesquerie of swollen hips and breasts spilling from a low-cut gown. “Kestrel Wants No Hussies” was printed below in smudged ink.
Poor lass. What a bloody thing to read about oneself.
“Ignorant brutes,” Tompkins muttered. “If I catch them at it, I’ll bash them with a broomstick.”
“Oh, they just want a reaction,” Miss Arden said. “Best to ignore it.”
She said this with conviction, but she looked shaken.
He was inclined to agree with Miss Tompkins. Given the mocking whispers his own mother had endured throughout his childhood, he would happily throttle any man who was capable of spewing such filth.
“May I have that?” he asked Tompkins.
Both she and Miss Arden looked at him in surprise. “You would like a souvenir?” Miss Arden asked.
He was not entirely sure if she was joking.
“No.” He took the paper, rolled it up, and tucked it inside his waistcoat. “I want to see to it that my men remove these from your gate right away. We’ll look into who might have posted them.”
Miss Arden seemed like she wanted to protest, but Miss Tompkins gave her a loaded look and smiled at him. “Thank you, Mr. Anderson. You are kind to offer help.”
Miss Arden met his eye. “I’m sure he will say he is merely neighborly,” she said to Tompkins, without breaking his gaze. Her expression danced with something playful. Something like the way she had looked at him as her sheer dress had whipped around her ankles in the belvedere.
God, to be looked at like that.
“Not merely,” he said. He heard a whisper of regret in his own voice. From the way she paused, he knew she heard it, too.
He was glad.
Glad? Christ. Stop this.
He lowered his eyes so she would not be able to look upon the desire in them and patted the poster. “I must return to Tregereth’s. I’ll see about these vile things.”
He turned to leave but paused, for it had to be said even if he knew his throat would become raspy with emotion. “And Miss Arden?”
“Yes?”
“Thank you for attending to my daughter. I shudder to think what might have happened had you not been close by.”
She glanced up at his tone, which was indeed more graveled than he liked. And then she smiled at him, utterly without irony.
And with that smile, in her butter-yellow dress and purple ear bobs with the sun shining off her lustrous hair, she looked nothing like that woodcut. She looked like a stained glass window or an illuminated manuscript. Like the woman who kept appearing in his dreams.
“Of course, Mr. Anderson,” she said. “Merely being neighborly.”
He nodded and stepped out the door into the sunshine, wondering why it was that every time he was in Miss Arden’s presence his heart ended up in his kneecaps.
Chapter Six
Miss Arden models herself a reformer when she is nothing but a temptress, a fallen Jezebel whose fine speech belies a mission to turn England’s virtuous females into unrepentant whores. Her announcement of her memoirs should not be met with anticipation, but disgust. The only place her words belong is in the fire.
—The Town Mercury, 1797
* * *
It wasn’t so much a noise as a prickle on her spine that woke Seraphina in the early light of dawn.
She froze, listening.
A pebble hit her window.
Someone was outside. On the terrace below her bedchamber.
“Tompkins?” she hissed. “Maria? Is that you?”
Silence.
She angled her ear toward the window. Footsteps?
It’s nothing. Go back to sleep.
She heard another pebble.
She bolted out of bed and crouched on the floor, rummaging for a dressing gown and regretting that in the heat she had chosen to sleep nude.
She threw the garment over her shoulders and clutched it tight around herself as though it might protect her from whatever was outside.
Prowlers, no doubt. Just like when she’d been seventeen.
She’d willed herself to forget those visits in the dead of night. Never violent, never loud enough to wake her father. Just intrusive enough to make her know that she was being watched.
Well, she was no longer seventeen, and she didn’t intend to scurry on the floorboards being terrified in silence.
She took a pitcher of water off her dressing table and rose onto her knees, creeping to the window to peer just above the sill in case whoever was afoot below was armed with heavier rocks.
She’d douse them with cold water. Teach them that she was no longer a person to be stalked.
But there was no one on the terrace.
It was not a person, but a bird.
A kingfisher. Splayed on its back, its turquoise wings outstretched like an opened lady’s fan, and its wheat-gold breast sliced open.
She gasped and clutched the window ledge, fighting a wave of sickness.
The bird moved one wing and with a terrible certainty she realized the poor creature was not yet dead.
Oh no. Oh please, no.
She ran down the stairs and to the terrace doors, scrabbling with the lock. She burst outside and knelt before the tiny, bleeding bird. It made a low, wretched noise—a sound of suffering. She felt a sob rise from her throat. “Oh, you poor darling. Poor darling.”
She wanted to soothe it, to clutch it to her chest. But that would only hurt it.