DANGEROUS GROUND
Lucian Greymont spent the better part of Tuesday morning trying not to remember the precise shape of Miss Ashworth in his arms.
It was an idiotic use of time. The memory returned whether invited or not, with the stubbornness of rain in Northumberland and rather more force than he cared to admit. He remembered the weight of her when he lifted her to Tempest's saddle, lighter than it ought to have been. He remembered the cold of the fog beading on her cloak, the warmth of her through the soaked wool, the small involuntary sound she had made when he mounted behind her. Most of all, he remembered the instant on the moor before anger had properly found words, when he saw her alone in the mist and felt, with complete and sickening clarity, what it would mean if he were too late.
That was the part he mistrusted.
Fear for another person was not in itself dishonorable. A landlord had every right to concern himself with the welfare of those under his roof. A gentleman, if one still wished to claim the term, ought not ride calmly home while a woman lost herself on the moors in November fog.
But what had seized him yesterday had not felt like duty. Duty was measured. Cold. Useful. This had been something rawer. Immediate. Something that had sent him out of the Hall without gloves and half-buttoned coat, riding hard enough that Roberts muttered under his breath when he returned.
Lucian distrusted anything in himself that resembled urgency.
He sat at the library desk that morning with estate accounts open before him and absorbed none of them. Figures swam. Names of tenant farms refused to remain fixed on the page. Twice he found himself reading the same line without sense. On the third attempt he shut the ledger with more force than was strictly necessary and stared instead at the grey light falling across the floorboards.
Miss Ashworth was not in the library. He knew this because he had chosen the room precisely because she was absent from it. She spent Tuesday mornings in the east gallery now, working through a set of history shelves that required a small side table and better light than the main floor offered. He had discovered this accidentally yesterday and then resented himself for knowing it.
The house had altered in her presence. That was the plain fact of it. Not dramatically. No doors had flung open in celebration, no ancestral portraits smiled, no ghostly mothers descended staircases to pronounce blessings. But there was movement now where before there had been stillness. The soft scratch of a pen. A lamp burning late. Books displaced and returned with purpose. The occasional low remark to herself when a shelf offended her sense of order.
It was astonishing how quickly a solitary man could begin arranging his thoughts around the existence of another person. More astonishing still how dangerous that arrangement felt.
A knock sounded at the half-open door.
Roth entered carrying the morning packets. The steward was a narrow, composed man in his middle fifties, with thinning brown hair and the expression of one who had long ago accepted human frailty as a tiresome but inevitable impediment to good management.
"Your Grace." He set a sheaf of papers on the desk. "Accounts from the north tenants. Also a note from Widow Thompson. The roof on the upper cottage has gone again. She says the wind took three slates last night and half the kitchen is now acquainted with the weather."
Lucian reached for the note. "Why was I not told sooner?"
Roth's brow did not move, but disapproval somehow entered the room all the same. "You were retrieving Miss Ashworth from the moor when the message came. Mrs. Holloway judged one emergency at a time sufficient for the household."
Lucian made a brief sound that might have been annoyance, though not at Roth. "Quite right. Have the men gone up?"
"They can patch it, but Thompson's chimney breast is failing as well. It needs more than a patch."
Lucian stood. "Then I'll go myself. If we're replacing the stonework before the frost deepens, I want to see the line of the wall before anyone starts making decisions for me."
"Very good, Your Grace." Roth hesitated, which from him amounted to flagrant editorializing. "The lower road is slick. Take care."
"You sound like Mrs. Holloway."
"Mrs. Holloway is usually correct. It would be inefficient not to notice."
Lucian almost smiled. Instead he reached for his gloves. "If Miss Ashworth asks after me, tell her I've gone to Thompson's farm."
The words left his mouth before he examined them. He saw, by the slight narrowing of Roth's eyes, that the steward had noticed.
"Certainly, Your Grace," he said, in the exact tone he might have used had Lucian instructed him to inform the archbishop of the same thing.
The upper tenant cottages lay beyond the west ridge, where the valley narrowed and the wind had less distance in which to exhaust itself before striking stone. Widow Thompson's farm was one of the oldest holdings on the estate: twenty poor acres, a dozen sheep, two cows, and enough stubbornness in its inhabitants to survive weather that would have killed more reasonable people.
Lucian rode out with a groom and two laborers following in a cart. The sky remained low and colorless. The rain had moved on, leaving the earth heavy and slick beneath Tempest's hooves. Along the lane, stone walls sweated damp. A rook rose from a bare ash tree and cut across the fields like a rag of black cloth.
He preferred days like this when he was among tenants. Work simplified things. A roof must be mended or it must not. A field drained or left to drown. A family needed coal, seed, a cow, three days' grace with rent. Such matters admitted solutions, even when the solutions cost money he did not truly possess. They were a relief from the sorts of problems one could not solve by hiring masons.
Widow Thompson met him at the cottage door with a shawl pinned fiercely across her breast and rain in the hem of her skirt. She was somewhere beyond sixty and had been addressing him in the same tone since he was a boy, which was to say as though title and age were mutually negligible.
"About time you came and looked at it yourself," she said, without preamble. "I told Mr. Baines last winter that chimney would go. But no, he put mortar where stone was needed and called it Christian economy."
Lucian dismounted. "Then Mr. Baines was a fool. Let me see it."
"Aye, he was that. Mind your head in the kitchen. The drip's found the one place the bucket can't reach proper."
The damage was worse than the note suggested. Water darkened the inner wall where the chimney breast had begun to pull away from the roofline. Three slates lay broken in the yard. One rafter in the kitchen had taken a stain that meant rot if left through winter.
Lucian climbed to the loft with Baines's replacement, examined the join, and came down swearing softly enough that Widow Thompson pretended not to hear.
"The stack comes down to the shoulder," he said. "Then it goes up again in proper stone. New slates on the west pitch. Brace the rafter before dark. Thompson, you'll come down to the Hall for two nights while the work's opened. No argument."
The widow drew herself up. "I've slept in that house since before your father was born."
"And you'll sleep two nights in comfort at my expense now." He glanced at the patched blanket nailed near the kitchen window. "Bring your daughter and the boy. The east servants' rooms stand empty. Mrs. Holloway will grumble and feed you scandalously well."
Widow Thompson sniffed, which in her signified acceptance. "Your mother always said you'd turn soft if no one watched you."
"My mother was rarely wrong."
That, unexpectedly, gentled the older woman's face. "No. She wasn't." She tied her shawl tighter. "You've her look today. Round the eyes. Means you're tired and pretending not to be."
Lucian, who had just been measuring a chimney breast, found himself absurdly close to feeling sixteen. "You summoned me for masonry, not prophecy."
"Same trade, near enough. Both depend on seeing where things are likely to crack." Widow Thompson jerked her chin toward the cart. "Go on, then. Tell your men what to do. And mind the upper track. It slides this time of year."
By the time the instructions were given and the first stones levered down, Lucian's coat was dusted with grit and mortar. He stood back from the cottage yard, looking across the fields to judge drainage, when movement on the lane below caught his eye.
A blue cloak. Dark head bare to the pale light. A figure walking with enough purpose to be recognizable from an absurd distance.
Miss Ashworth.
She was not close enough to see him yet. She moved along the lower field path with Lottie beside her, the maid gesturing animatedly toward something in the hedgerow. The sight of them there, small against the broad dun fields, produced in Lucian a sensation he disliked immediately because it contained relief without any corresponding emergency.
Roth's dry imaginary voice arrived at once in his thoughts: *Careful, Your Grace.*
He remained where he was, one boot braced on a loose stone, and watched until she turned at some remark from Lottie and laughed. The wind carried none of the sound up to him, but he knew the shape of it by now.
"You might as well wave," said Widow Thompson from behind him. "You're staring like a sheepdog that's spotted a gate left open."
Lucian turned too quickly. "Mrs. Thompson, if you have strength for insolence, perhaps you should lay the chimney yourself."
"Perhaps I would, if my knees still bent proper." She peered down the lane. "That's the new scholar, then?"
"The librarian. Miss Ashworth."
"Mm." The widow considered the distant pair with unsettling calm. "Looks sensible. That's unfortunate. Sensible women are harder on a man than foolish ones. They see him clear."
Lucian decided the roof required his immediate attention and left before Thompson could improve upon the remark.
He returned to the Hall in the late afternoon, mud-spattered, cold, and more thoroughly out of sorts than masonry justified. Miss Ashworth was nowhere in evidence when he entered by the side door. He discovered, to his annoyance, that he noticed at once.
Mrs. Holloway intercepted him in the back corridor with a dry towel over one arm and the exact expression of a woman who has long ceased to be impressed by the weathering of noblemen.
"The roof was bad, then?" she asked.
"Bad enough. Thompson and her family will be here two nights. Have the east servants' rooms aired."
"Already done. Lottie said as much when she came back from the village with Miss Ashworth." Mrs. Holloway handed him the towel whether he wanted it or not. "She brought thread, two ledgers, and something from the circulating library in Ashford. Though why anyone needs more books in this house is beyond me."
"She went to Ashford?"
"With Lottie. At my instruction. Since she nearly got swallowed by the weather yesterday, I thought an escorted walk down the lower lane might satisfy her taste for fresh air without requiring you to ride her out of a bog again." Mrs. Holloway's eyes rested on him with maddening mildness. "Did you object?"
"No," Lucian said shortly.
"Good. Then wash. You smell of mortar."
He had just enough sense not to answer that.
Dinner was quieter than usual, though not from discomfort. Miss Ashworth seemed genuinely tired from the walk and the day's work. She spoke of Ashford, of a church with Norman stones in its oldest wall and a bookseller with more ambition than stock. Lucian spoke of Widow Thompson's chimney and was rewarded with an earnest discussion of whether repairs to tenant cottages ought to be recorded in the estate books under maintenance or capital improvement.
It was absurdly pleasant.
That made it suspect.
After the meal he should have gone to his study. Instead, carried by a species of recklessness that increasingly masqueraded as habit, he suggested they walk the long gallery before the evening turned in. Miss Ashworth looked surprised, then agreeable.
The portrait gallery lay in the older part of the west wing, where the ceiling dropped lower and the floorboards held a more ancient pitch of creak beneath the carpets. Lamps had been lit at intervals, leaving pools of amber along the walls while the far ends dissolved into shadow. Ancestors watched from gilt frames in varying degrees of disapproval, bad tailoring, and inherited hauteur.
Miss Ashworth slowed before each portrait with the attentiveness she gave books. She had the irritating habit of treating dead Greymonts as though they were texts to be interpreted rather than monuments to be endured.
"Your family had remarkably strong noses," she observed mildly, pausing before an eighteenth-century duke whose profile could have opened envelopes. "One feels natural selection ought to have intervened by now."
"It did. We married women with better features."
That won him the glance over her shoulder that meant she was suppressing laughter and failing slightly. She moved on to a portrait of his grandfather in hunting pink.
"He looks as though he would shelve Milton beside manuals on pig-breeding merely to see who noticed."
"He did a great many things for the pleasure of private amusement."
They stopped, inevitably, before his father's portrait.
No matter how often Lucian encountered that painted face, it remained an ambush. The artist had flattered him slightly. The old duke's mouth had been crueller in life, the eyes smaller and quicker. Yet the essential truth remained. Arrogance. Appetite. The polished ease of a man who considered other people furniture with opinions.
Lucian felt the familiar tightening at the back of his neck.
"He was handsome," Miss Ashworth said at last, and when Lucian's expression altered she added quietly, "I did not say kind."
"He was not." The words came flatter than he intended. "He was very accomplished at appearing charming to those from whom he wanted something. The rest of us had the privilege of truth."
She looked from the portrait to him. The silence stretched. Lucian heard himself continue, though he had not meant to speak.
"When I was ten, he had a footman whipped for dropping a decanter at supper. Not dismissed. Whipped. Because he said an example made servants efficient. My mother argued with him in front of the whole table. He did not speak to her for a week afterward, which was the only mercy she got from it." He kept his eyes on the portrait. "That was a good week in the house."
Miss Ashworth said nothing. There was no exclamation, no fashionable horror, no soft attempt to comfort what could not be comforted. Only listening.
It made further honesty feel perversely possible.
"He could be generous," Lucian went on. "That was the difficulty. Cruel men are easiest when they are only cruel. He made gifts of horses, paid debts no one expected him to notice, endowed church repairs in villages he had never seen. People called him a fine landlord and an exacting master. Both were true. They simply did not know the scale on which he exacted things."
"And because he was not always monstrous," she said quietly, "people excused what monstrosity they did see."
Lucian turned to look at her.
"Yes."
She regarded the portrait for another moment, then said, in the same quiet tone, "You look nothing like him."
The words struck him harder than they should have. Lucian almost answered with some dismissive remark, something cool and practiced. Instead what came out was nearer truth.
"I have his blood."
"Blood is not fate." She met his gaze fully. There was no softness in her expression now, only certainty. "Inheritance is not destiny, Your Grace. If it were, none of us would have any moral work left to do."
He laughed once, though there was no humor in it. "That is a very elegant argument from a woman who has never watched herself think with another man's temper."
"No. Only with my own father's melancholy and my mother's impatience, and those are trouble enough." She stepped closer to the portrait, then to him by implication. "But I know this much. Men who are truly like your father do not stand before his image in fear of resemblance. They assume likeness is their right."
Lucian stared at her.
Somewhere behind them the lamps hissed faintly. Outside, wind moved along the western windows. The gallery had gone very still.
"You speak," he said after a moment, "with astonishing confidence on matters you cannot know."
"I know what I see." She glanced toward the canvas and back again. "And what I see is a man who has spent eight years punishing himself in case guilt might prove hereditary. It is a waste of a perfectly good life, if you want my opinion."
He almost told her he had not asked for it. But the protest died before reaching speech because she was standing too near now, near enough that the lamplight had caught green fire in her eyes. Near enough that he could see the fine line where one dark strand had escaped near her temple. Near enough that every disciplined instinct in him began withdrawing in alarm.
"Miss Ashworth," he said, and the title came out lower than usual.
She did not move back. "Yes?"
Her voice was very quiet.
That was the moment the room changed.
Not outwardly. The portraits remained portraits, the lamps lamps, the old carpet still held the scent of dust and age. But the air between them altered, tightened, as though the distance had become a live thing.
Lucian became abruptly conscious of ridiculous details. The gloved hand he had not yet removed from habit and weather. The pulse in her throat. The exact shape of her mouth when she was not speaking. The fact that if he lifted one hand and set it at her waist there would be almost no space at all between them.
He did not move.
Neither did she.
The attraction, when he allowed himself finally to name it, was not clean in the way bodily desire sometimes was. It was threaded through with admiration, irritation, trust, anger at himself, gratitude he had no right to feel, and that most dangerous element of all, recognition. She saw him too clearly. He wanted, against reason, to see what would happen if he let her go on.
Slowly, as if approaching an unexploded shell, Lucian lifted his hand.
His fingers did not touch her. They stopped a breath from her cheek, near enough that he could feel the heat of her skin.
Miss Ashworth inhaled.
That small sound nearly undid him.
He bent toward her. Not far. Barely enough for the world to tilt.
And then the memory came, as swift and merciless as a blade.
Catherine in her wedding silk, standing in another corridor eight years earlier, looking up at him with resignation so complete it had felt like blame. The cold knowledge that he had taken vows he did not know how to honor. The later image, ineradicable, of her pale as linen in the bed where she died, and the child dead with her, and the room full of women who would not meet his eyes. The impossible guilt of relief buried beneath grief, black and poisonous and permanent.
Lucian stepped back as though struck.
Miss Ashworth's expression changed at once, not dramatically, but enough. Surprise first. Then understanding, which was somehow worse.
"I beg your pardon," he said, though for what precisely he was apologizing he could not have said. For nearly touching her. For wanting to. For making the air between them carry what could not be spoken.
She straightened by a degree. Her own voice, when it came, was composed. "There is nothing to pardon."
That formal composure felt like a rebuke, though she had not meant it as one.
Lucian turned away from the portrait, away from her, toward the far end of the gallery where the lamps thinned into shadow.
"Good night, Miss Ashworth."
He heard the inadequacy of it and hated it immediately.
A beat passed before she answered. "Good night, Your Grace."
He walked the length of the gallery without once looking back.
In his study he shut the door more quietly than the moment deserved and stood with both hands braced on the desk, breathing as if he had come in from a hard ride.
This was precisely why men like him had no business with hope.
Hope made fools of honorable intentions. It suggested that because a conversation had gone well, because a woman's gaze held no fear, because loneliness had briefly eased in her company, one might reach for warmth without bringing ruin with it. Hope ignored evidence. Hope forgot graves.
Lucian had two of those in his keeping, one literal and one less easily named.
He remained there until the candles burned low.
Much later, when the house had gone mostly quiet, a soft knock came at the study door.
"Come in."
Roth entered carrying the final packet of accounts. He set them down and made as if to withdraw, then paused.
"Widow Thompson and her family are settled in the east servants' rooms," he said. "Mrs. Holloway reports no complaints, which she considers ominous."
"Thank you."
Roth nodded once, but did not yet leave. "And the west chimney at Thompson's should hold by Sunday if weather stays fair."
"Good."
Another pause.
Lucian looked up. "What is it, Roth?"
The steward's face remained as composed as ever. "Nothing of consequence, Your Grace. Only that Miss Ashworth asked after the repairs before she retired. She seemed concerned for the widow's comfort."
"That does not surprise me."
"No." Roth adjusted one cuff with deliberate care. "It ought not surprise you either that some presences improve a house without asking permission."
Lucian stared at him.
Roth inclined his head just enough to make insolence respectable. "Good evening, Your Grace."
Then he left Lucian alone with the accounts, the fading fire, and the irritating suspicion that everyone in Greymont Hall had formed an opinion he was the last to state plainly.
He sat down at last, drew a blank sheet toward him, and attempted figures again. But the numbers would not remain numbers. They became instead the line of her face turned up to his in the gallery, the certainty in her voice when she said blood was not fate, the pulse-beat moment before he stepped back.
Dangerous ground, he thought.
He had spent years learning where the weak earth lay beneath his feet, where grief gave way to guilt, where memory collapsed into self-reproach. He had thought himself practiced at avoiding it.
But there were other forms of dangerous ground, it seemed. A lamplit gallery. A woman who refused to be frightened by old shadows. A life not yet lived, standing suddenly close enough to touch.
And those, he suspected, were far worse.
END OF CHAPTER SIX
*Word count: ~4,050*
Get new chapters in your inbox. Choose your series: