Which likely meant he was the problem. She trained her eyes upon his profile pensively, confirming his suspicion that Westhaven had already succeeded in making him visibly insane.
“Forgive me, but I can’t shake the sense that we have met before, Your Grace.”
He shook his head, mildly relieved that she had at last said words unbidden.
“Not that I recall.” He had never seen her face before the moment he had sent a potted plumeria crashing toward it. It was not one he would easily forget.
“Is it not possible we were introduced in the past? Perhaps you knew my late uncle?”
“I’m afraid I did not have that privilege.”
He had spent his youth buried in books when he was not away at school. Mingling with the local gentry had been his elder brother’s job as heir.
“I must be mistaken.” She wrapped her arms tightly around her chest. He saw gooseflesh along the back of her wrist beneath the faded ribbon of her cuff.
“Are you warm enough?”
“Yes,” she said through chattering teeth.
“You’re shivering,” he could not resist observing.
“I forgot my cloak,” she admitted darkly, like he had won a concession.
He was tempted to smile. Her stubbornness reminded him not a little of himself.
“Here, hold the reins.” He handed her the horses, which she accepted capably, and reached below the seat for the soft, woolen shawl kept there by his sister. “Take this.”
After a brief hesitation she accepted it, arranging it gingerly around her plain gray dress. He wondered at her choice of garments. She had the polished speech of a noblewoman, yet dressed like a farmer’s daughter. He had been distantly familiar with Bantham Park in his youth and knew her uncle had been a comfortable squire. That she chose to engage in trade and work out of doors surely won her no approbation from the genteel residents of Wiltshire.
He supposed he could forgive her for being rather brittle and unfriendly, the mysterious Miss Cavendish. He was well aware that the satisfactions to be won by flouting the customs of society did not come without a price. He had spent the better part of the last two decades paying it himself.
She pointed at a wooded path so narrow and overgrown it barely qualified as a road. “Turn here.”
“Bantham Park is miles off,” he corrected her, not bothering to slow the horses.
“I’m going to Greenwoods House. My new nursery. Quick, you’ll miss the turn.”
He swerved onto a narrow path, ducking to avoid being smacked in the head by passing branches.
“Might I ask why you are moving your nursery into the middle of an inaccessible forest?”
“This is a shortcut.”
She was skirting the question.
“Actually, Miss Cavendish, I am curious why you are moving your nursery at all. Your plants seemed to be thriving as they are at Bantham Park.”
She glanced at him as though deciding whether she could trust him with her private business. Evidently, she ruled against it. “The reasons are personal, but I assure you they are sound.”
“By my reckoning, if you were to add a few more weeks to your schedule, there would be less risk of error.”
“I appreciate your concern, Your Grace,” she said with a glacial, insincere politeness that would make his sister proud.
He rubbed his temple. He was clumsy. Irritating her had not been his intention. There was a reason he was called the Merchant Duke. Efficiency in business was his particular passion, the way some men were obsessed with horse racing or Egyptology.
The path widened, revealing several acres of farmland in the clearing. A dilapidated wooden cottage sat in the middle, its boards peeling, several windows lacking panes of glass. To the side was a crumbling old stable, and beyond it the foundations of several smaller buildings, freshly laid.
Here was at least part of the explanation for her urgent need for laborers: her new nursery was, as far as he could see, not yet built.
He stopped the horses in front of the shabby old house.
“Miss Cavendish?”
“Yes?”
“How do you plan to move the contents of your greenhouse when this property lacks a greenhouse to move them to?”
“Your men are going to build me one, Your Grace. Thank you for driving me.” She hopped down from the curricle without waiting for his assistance. “Good evening.”
He stared down at her.
“You can’t think that I am going to leave you here.” It was approaching dusk, and the house, as far as he could tell, was deserted.
“I’ll be fine. ’Tis a short walk back to Bantham Park from here. Two miles.”
He smiled at her with icy patience. “Take your time. I’ll wait.”
She shrugged and disappeared behind the house. He amused himself by stepping down to the path and peeking inside the front door of the cottage. If the place looked uninhabitable from the outside, it looked worse from within. Cobwebs, collapsed floorboards, damp stains, mice. He would have a word with Grouse. If she intended to inhabit this firetrap, it would need more than fifteen men to restore it in a fortnight.
He returned to the curricle and arranged himself in front of the reins as though he’d never left, sensing she would not look fondly on him prowling around her grounds uninvited.
She surprised him by returning in a quarter hour sporting a blinding smile. God’s nails, the transformation. She was so lovely that he had to prevent himself from staring.
She accepted his hand and swung into her seat. “It’s actually astonishing, how much they’ve accomplished in one day.”
“I expected no less than perfection,” he said, tightening his jaw to keep from beaming right back at her. It would not do to seem giddy, but after two days of pure peevishness, he felt like a boy who’d finally wrested approval from an exacting governess.
The feeling did not last. Her mouth returned to its downturned resting place. They made the rest of the drive to Bantham Park in silence.
Miss Cavendish allowed him to help her down. “Thank you for driving me. Good night.”
He watched as she made her way inside. The house was dark, with only a servant’s lamp burning in the kitchen.
Everything else was sheer chaos.
The orderly scene he’d encountered the day before was now in a state of bedlam. Grouse’s men had wasted no time uprooting trees, hauling off crates in carts, making tracks in the soil. It looked like the place had been ransacked by a roving pack of thieves.
The question was, why?
Why risk such haste?
He made a mental note to speak to Grouse. If Miss Cavendish was in some kind of trouble, it would be best to know the nature of her circumstances before the Westmead name was hopelessly entangled.
For looking at these grounds, one thing was clear: it was madness, whatever Miss Cavendish was up to.
Yet she didn’t strike him as a woman whose sanity was in question.
She struck him as a woman who had something to hide.
He intended to find out what.
Chapter 5
“The atrium ceiling will be strung with seven hundred ribbons of bedstraw and meadowsweet, each sixty feet in length. Which means we need—” Poppy chewed her quill, calculating in her head. “Oh dear. Thirty bushels of foraged blossoms and five hundred skeins of white linen thread.”