Good God! How damaged had she been? And why was he pursuing this line of questioning? He did not deal in darkness. He hoped she would answer with a simple monosyllable or not at all.
“Ben—Sir Benedict Harper—had his legs shattered and refused to have them amputated,” she said. “Vincent, Viscount Darleigh, was blinded in his first battle at the age of seventeen, and deafened too at first. Ralph, Duke of Worthingham, was hacked almost to ribbons with a saber when he was unseated from his horse in a cavalry charge. Flavian, Viscount Ponsonby, was shot in the head and then fell on it from his horse. Hugo, Lord Trentham, was not wounded at all. He sustained not even a scratch, though he had led a Forlorn Hope that killed almost all his men and severely wounded those few who survived. He went out of his mind. George did not even go to war, but his only son did and died, and then his wife jumped to her death over the cliffs at the edge of his estate. And I . . . ? I was present when my husband died, but they did not kill me. Yes, three years. And those men are my very dearest friends in this world.”
Percy found himself fondling Hector’s damaged ear and wishing again that he had not started this. Shattered legs. Blind at the age of seventeen—and deaf too. Sons dying and wives committing suicide—over the edge of a cliff. And what the devil had happened to Lady Barclay while her husband was in captivity, presumably being tortured? It was something ghastly enough that she had spent three years at Penderris Hall. He felt a trickle of sweat snake down his spine. He did not want to know.
“When I left Penderris,” she said, “I came here. My father had died during those three years, my mother had gone to live with her sister, my aunt, in Cumberland, my brother had taken my father’s place with his wife and children, and I did not think it fair to go there, though my sister-in-law very graciously invited me. I could not bear to live in the hall here with my father-in-law and Aunt Lavinia, even though more than three years had gone by. I asked for the dower house, and my father-in-law reluctantly allowed me to go there. That is my story, Lord Hardford. You were entitled to hear it since you have come here for however short a time to find me living on your land. Shall we go down onto the beach?”
“Down there?” he asked sharply. “No.”
She turned her head to look steadily at him.
“I have never seen the attraction of beaches,” he said—well, not for a long time, anyway. “They are just a lot of sand and water. Why is Hardford not more prosperous than it is? Or do you not know?”
“It pays its way,” she said. “At least, that is what my father-in-law was always fond of saying.”
“It does,” he agreed. “And he was content with that?”
She turned her face away and did not answer immediately.
“He was never a particularly ambitious man,” she said. “Dicky used to get impatient with him. He had all sorts of ideas and plans, but they were never implemented. He decided that the military life would be a better outlet for his energy. I believe his father lost all heart after Dicky died.”
“And Ratchett?” he asked. “Was he ever an efficient steward?”
“Maybe once upon a time,” she said. “My father-in-law inherited him.”
“And he never considered that it might be time to put the man out to pasture and hire someone more . . . vigorous?” Percy was frowning. And he was wishing with all his heart that he could go back to the night of his birthday and erase the sudden drunken impulse to come to Cornwall. Sometimes what one did not know was best left that way.
“I doubt he ever considered it,” she said. “Mr. Ratchett keeps very neat and orderly books. He spends his days surrounded by them and makes new entries in them as needed. If you wish to know anything concerning rents and crops and flocks or anything else on the estate for the past forty or fifty years, you will surely find the answer in meticulous detail within those pages.”
“I feel rather, Lady Barclay,” he said impatiently, “as though I had stepped into a different universe.”
“I suppose,” she said, “the situation is reversible. You could go back to where you—” She stopped abruptly.
... where you came from?
... where you belong?
“And leave that house, my house, to be turned into a menagerie?” he asked. “Do you realize that eventually, if Lady Lavinia continues to add every stray who is canny enough to wander up to the doors—and word must be spreading fast in the animal kingdom—eventually the house is going to become uninhabitable by humans? That it will be hopelessly coated with dog and cat hair? That it will smell?”
“You would have them turned away to starve, then?” she asked.
“It is not possible to feed all the hungry of this world,” he said.
“Aunt Lavinia does not even try to take on the world’s woes,” she told him. “She merely feeds the hungry who come to her door—to your door.”
He felt a sudden suspicion. “Are we talking just about dogs and cats?” he asked.