“What precisely are you saying, Bram?”
“I’m saying, no women. Not so long as we’re encamped here.” He cast a glance at Thorne. “That’s an order.”
The lieutenant made no reply, save to skewer the two skinned hares on a sharpened branch.
“Since when do I take orders from you?” Colin asked.
Bram leveled a gaze at him. “Since my father died, and I came back from the Peninsula to find you stickpin-deep in debt, that’s when. I don’t relish the duty, but I hold your fortune in trust for the next several months. So long as I’m paying your bills, you’ll do as I say. Unless you get married, in which case you’d spare us both the better part of a year’s aggravation.”
“Oh yes. Marriage being a fine way for a man to spare himself aggravation.” Colin shoved to his feet and stalked away, into the shadows.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Bram called. Colin was welcome to have his adolescent sulk, but he should take care. They hadn’t checked the soundness of the entire castle, and there were those steep bluffs nearby . . .
“I’m going to have a piss, dear cousin. Or did you want me to keep my pego buttoned for that, too?”
Bram wasn’t any happier than Colin about this arrangement. It seemed ridiculous that a man of six-and-twenty, a viscount since his tender years, should even require a trustee. But the terms of his inheritance—meant to encourage the timely production of a legitimate heir—clearly stipulated that the Payne fortune was held in trust until Colin either married or turned twenty-seven.
And so long as Colin was his responsibility, Bram knew of no better way to handle the situation than to make his cousin a soldier. He’d taken far less promising fellows and drilled a sense of discipline and duty into them. Deserters, debtors, hardened criminals . . . the man seated across the fire, for one. If Samuel Thorne had made good, any man had hope.
“Tomorrow we’ll start recruiting volunteers,” he told his corporal.
Thorne nodded, turning the roasting hares on the spit.
“The village seems the likely place to begin.”
Another barely perceptible nod.
“Sheepdogs,” Thorne mused sometime later. “Perhaps I’ll find a few. They’d come in useful. Then again, hounds are better for game.”
“No dogs,” Bram said. He wasn’t one for pets. “We’ll only be here a month.”
A rustling sound in the shadows had them both turning their heads. A bat, perhaps. Or maybe a snake. Then again, he supposed it was just as likely a rat.
“What we need in this place,” Thorne said, “is a cat.”
Bram scowled. “For God’s sake, I am not acquiring a cat.”
Thorne looked to the woolly beast at his knee and cocked a brow. “You seem to have acquired a lamb, my lord.”
“The lamb goes home tomorrow.”
“And if he doesn’t?”
“He’s dinner.”
Five
In a village of women, secrets had shorter life expectancies than gnats. The moment she opened the door of Bright’s All Things the next morning, Susanna was inundated with queries and questions. She ought to have known she would be besieged. Young ladies crowded around her like hens after corn, pecking for bits of information.
“Is it true, what we’ve heard? What they’re saying, is it true?” Nineteen-year-old Sally, the second eldest of the Bright children, leaned eagerly over the counter.
“That would depend.” Susanna lifted her hands to untie the ribbons of her bonnet. As she worked the knots loose, anticipation in the shop built to a palpable fever.
“Depend on what?”
“On who ‘they’ are, and precisely what it is they’re saying.” She spoke calmly. Someone had to.
“They say we’ve been invaded!” Violet Winterbottom said. “By men.”
“What else would we be invaded by? Wolves?”
Susanna looked about the shop, taking a moment to collect her thoughts and enjoy the familiar splendor. This sight never failed to enchant her. The first time she’d entered Bright’s All Things shop, she’d felt as though she’d stumbled upon Ali Baba’s treasure cave.
The shop’s front was lined with south-facing diamond-paned windows, which admitted an abundance of golden sunlight. Each of its other three walls was stacked, floor to lofty ceiling, with shelves—and those shelves were crammed with colorful goods of every sort. Bolts of silk and lace, quills and bottles of ink, buttons and brilliants, charcoal and pigments, comfits and pickled limes, tooth powder, dusting powder, and much, much more—all of it sparkling in the midday sun.
“The inn’s scullery maid had it all from her brother.” Sally’s cheeks were pink with excitement. “A band of officers have encamped on the bluffs.”
“Is it true there’s a lord in their party?” Violet asked.