THE MOORS AND THE DOCTOR
Theodora Ashworth discovered on the Monday of her second week at Greymont Hall that work, however absorbing, could not wholly cure restlessness.
For eight days she had moved between the east wing, the morning room, the library, and the small dining table where she and the Duke conducted their cautious evening truces. She had catalogued another two hundred volumes, identified a medieval psalter so delicate she scarcely dared breathe on it, and devised a shelving system that, if not elegant, was at least sane. She had also spent an increasing amount of effort not thinking about the previous Friday evening in the library and the exact timbre of Lucian Greymont's voice when it dropped into that dangerous quiet near the fire.
The effort had failed rather badly.
By Monday morning, after three hours spent wrestling a cluster of sermons away from a shelf of travel journals and another half hour devoted to deciphering the crabbed notes of some long-dead Greymont divine, she found herself standing at the library window instead of her desk, staring over the gardens toward the moors beyond.
Fog had burned away for once. The day lay clear and cold, all silver light and dun-colored heather stretching toward the horizon. Stone walls crossed the land in stern lines. A few sheep moved like scraps of dirty wool along a distant ridge. Beyond them rose the higher ground, vast and open and empty in a way that made the chest ache.
Thea had not realized, until this moment, how confined she had begun to feel.
Not trapped, precisely. Greymont Hall was no prison. No one had forbidden her the grounds, and Mrs. Holloway had been perfectly civil whenever Thea wandered into some previously unexplored corridor. Yet the house was large enough, and strange enough, to become a world entire if one allowed it. Thea had spent years in service within other people's walls. She knew how easily routine became enclosure.
A brisk knock sounded at the half-open library door.
Mrs. Holloway entered with a tray that held tea, bread, and a stern expression suggesting she had already formed an opinion about whatever Thea was about to say.
"You've been at it since dawn again," the housekeeper said, setting the tray on the side table near the fire. "A body can't live on ink and dust, whatever scholars may think."
"I assure you I have a deep respect for bread as a concept," Thea said. "I simply forgot the hour."
"Mm. That happens in this room." Mrs. Holloway followed her gaze toward the window. "Clear enough today, for a wonder."
"Very clear." Thea hesitated, then turned from the glass. "Mrs. Holloway, may I ask something?"
The housekeeper's eyes narrowed with kindly suspicion. "That depends whether it concerns the North Tower."
"It does not. I value my peace too highly." Thea folded her hands. "I wondered whether I might walk on the moors this afternoon. Only a little way. I find I should like some air that has not passed through stone walls first."
Mrs. Holloway's expression altered at once, becoming thoughtful rather than suspicious. "A walk is sensible enough, if the weather holds. But the moors aren't a London square, dear. Paths disappear where you'd swear there ought to be paths, and fog comes down faster than a curtain."
"I should not go far."
"Nobody ever means to." Mrs. Holloway sighed, then seemed to resign herself. "Very well. But you'll take the blue wool cloak, not that little thing you came in. And proper boots. And if the mist so much as thinks about gathering, you come straight back. Do you hear me?"
"Yes, Mrs. Holloway."
"And tell Lottie where you're gone before you leave. If I cannot stop the Hall from swallowing people whole, I can at least keep count of them." She moved toward the door, then paused. "You'll find the fresh air does good. This house can get into one's bones if one lets it."
Thea smiled. "I had begun to suspect as much."
By one o'clock she had done another hour's work out of sheer good conscience, then surrendered the pretense of concentration entirely. Lottie helped her into the heavier cloak, all the while exclaiming over the novelty of Miss Ashworth going out walking for pleasure.
"Mind the lower path, miss," the maid said, following her into the entrance hall. "It's less boggy than the high ridge, and if you keep the Hall to your right coming back you can't go too badly wrong. Unless the fog comes in. Or the weather changes. Or you meet one of the old standing stones, because my aunt says they're unlucky."
"Comforting," Thea said. "I shall avoid both standing stones and supernatural interference."
Lottie giggled, then looked abruptly solemn. "I mean it about the weather. It turns cruel quickly up there."
"I won't be long."
The front door closed behind her with a weighty thud, and at once the air felt different, sharper and cleaner than anything inside the Hall. The cold caught at her cheeks. Her breath turned white before her. She stood for a moment on the front steps, taking in the sweep of the grounds under full daylight, and felt something loosen inside her that had been tightly knotted for days.
The gardens nearest the south front had once been formal. Their bones remained in yew hedges gone shaggy and gravel walks half-lost under moss. Beyond them the land gave itself over to the valley. Heather, bent grass, and stone. Small copses of wind-twisted trees. The distant thread of a stream flashing where the light caught it.
Thea chose the lower path as instructed. It wound first through neglected shrubberies and then out beyond the last of the kitchen walls, where the world opened abruptly and there was no sound save wind, the occasional cry of a bird, and the whisper of her own skirts against the heather.
It was beautiful in the severe way certain truths were beautiful.
She walked farther than she intended within the first twenty minutes simply because each rise in the ground suggested another view beyond it. Behind her, Greymont Hall stood dark against the pale sky, less monstrous by day yet no less imposing. From this distance its various additions made more sense. The Elizabethan heart of the house held the rest together as though force of character alone had compelled later centuries to fall into line. The north tower rose at one edge like an unsheathed blade.
Thea turned away from it and continued on.
Freedom felt embarrassingly intoxicating. No children calling from a schoolroom. No mistress waiting to inquire whether the French lesson had been completed. No drawing room full of genteel people pretending not to notice the governess unless she made some mistake that required correction. Only wind and land and the rhythm of her own steps.
She thought, as she walked, of her father. Not because the moor resembled anything from her childhood, for it did not, but because he had understood this particular species of solitude. A scholar among books for most of his life, he had nevertheless insisted on walking every day, even in poor weather, saying that too much thought without horizon made a prison of the mind. He had taken her with him when she was a girl and taught her the names of wildflowers and clouds and the pleasure of saying nothing beside someone who loved silence for the right reasons.
It had been five years since his death. Some days the fact sat lightly. Others it returned with all its original force, as if grief were less a straight line than a tide.
She was standing on a slight rise now, looking over a fold in the land where purple-brown heather gave way to coarse grass. Somewhere to her left, hidden by the slope, water ran over stones. The sound was thin and cold. She drew her cloak tighter and laughed aloud, for no reason except the absurd delight of hearing her own voice vanish into open air.
Then she saw that the light had changed.
Only subtly at first. The far ridge, clear a moment before, had blurred at the edges. A white thickness was creeping through the lower ground, not dramatic, not theatrical, merely efficient. Fog, moving with the purpose of something that belonged here far more naturally than she did.
Thea turned at once. Greymont Hall was still visible, but less distinctly than before.
I should go back.
She did. Immediately. Sensibly. She took what she judged to be the path by which she had come and quickened her pace.
Within five minutes she knew she had made a mistake.
The moor had altered in the fog's presence, as though visibility were not the only thing it consumed. The stone wall she remembered on her left was now nowhere to be seen. The track underfoot narrowed, then disappeared altogether beneath wet grass. The Hall vanished behind a fold of mist so complete it might never have existed.
Thea stopped, forcing herself to be still.
Panic was merely useless imagination in a louder voice.
The rule, she told herself, was simple: choose a direction and keep it. Wandering in circles would accomplish nothing. The land sloped downward to her right. If she followed the downward pull, surely she would find the stream, and from the stream one might eventually locate the valley road.
It was not, in principle, a stupid plan.
In practice the ground grew treacherous almost at once. The heather concealed holes. Waterlogged patches sucked at her boots. Twice she caught herself on hidden stones and nearly fell. The fog thickened until the world contracted to a circle of ten yards in every direction, all of it grey and muffled and subtly wrong.
She could no longer hear birds.
Only the wind remained, and even that seemed to come from changing directions.
After another quarter hour, Thea admitted inwardly what prudence had been shouting for some time: she was lost.
The realization was less dramatic than humiliating. She had prided herself on practicality, on not being one of those foolish women from novels who drifted into danger because beauty distracted them. And yet here she was on an English moor in deepening mist, unable to distinguish east from west and increasingly aware that her hands had begun to shake within her gloves.
"Very stupid," she muttered aloud. "Exceptionally stupid."
The fog offered no comment.
Then, faintly at first and then more distinctly, she heard the beat of hooves.
Relief surged so quickly it almost weakened her knees. She turned toward the sound and waited, straining her eyes through the white murk.
A dark shape emerged with sudden violence from the mist: horse, rider, motion. Tempest, lather-dark at the neck and tossing his head, and upon him the Duke of Greymont, coat flung on hastily over his riding clothes, his expression set in lines so severe that for one foolish instant Thea wondered whether he meant to murder her on the spot and have done with the inconvenience.
He reined in sharply a few feet away.
"What in God's name did you think you were doing?"
The words were not loud. They did not need to be.
Thea, who had spent the past ten minutes rehearsing dignified gratitude for any hypothetical rescue, found her own temper rising in answer. Perhaps fear required an object, and the Duke was handier than self-reproach.
"Walking," she said. "A pastime I had not realized required military escort."
His jaw tightened. "You were told the fog turns quickly."
"And I came back when it did. The moor appears not to have respected my intentions."
"This is not amusing."
"I had not thought it was."
Tempest stamped and tossed his head. The horse's impatience seemed a fair echo of his master's. The Duke looked at her for one hard, unreadable moment, and Thea saw beneath the anger something far less comfortable.
Fear.
Not for himself.
It startled her into silence.
"Can you mount?" he demanded.
"I beg your pardon?"
"Can you ride?"
"A little. Not well."
"That will do." He swung down from the saddle in one fluid motion and came toward her through the wet heather. "We're losing light. You will not find the house on foot before dark, and the lower ground east of here is bog. If you'd gone much farther…"
He did not finish the sentence. He did not need to.
Thea's pride, already battered, made one last valiant effort. "I can walk beside the horse."
"No." The word struck like flint. "You'll mount."
"Your Grace, I am not made of sugar."
"At present you are made of poor judgment and insufficient sense."
Under other circumstances she might have laughed. As it was, she stared at him. He stood very close now, hatless, the fog beading on his dark hair and on the shoulders of his coat. His scar stood pale against wind-reddened skin. There was nothing languid or ducal about him in this mood. He looked like what he was beneath title and tailoring: a man built for command, exhausted by fear, and furious because it had been necessary.
"You are angry," she said before she could stop herself.
"Yes."
"Because I disobeyed Mrs. Holloway?"
"Because you vanished into the moor in weather half the shepherds in Northumberland respect more than they respect God." He took a breath as though mastering himself by force. "And because for twenty minutes no one knew where you were."
The last words were quieter than the rest.
Something in Thea's resistance gave way.
"I am sorry," she said.
He closed his eyes briefly, perhaps in relief that she had ceased arguing, perhaps because apology made anger harder to maintain. When he opened them again, his voice had lost its edge, though not its authority.
"Come here."
He guided her toward Tempest's side. The horse rolled one dark eye at her but submitted when his master laid a hand on the bridle.
"Left foot there," the Duke said, clasping his hands for her stirrup. "Take hold of the pommel."
She obeyed, more because the fog had turned everything unreal than because obedience came naturally. The next instant his hands were at her waist, lifting.
The contact was practical. Entirely practical. He was simply getting her into the saddle because the alternative was idiocy.
That did not prevent her from feeling the full shock of it.
His hands were strong and sure, his grip firm through cloak and wool and all the respectable barriers the world could devise. For one suspended second she was nowhere at all, neither on ground nor horse, and then she settled onto the saddle with a breathless little involuntary sound she was grateful the wind likely stole.
The Duke mounted behind her.
This, too, was practical. Tempest was a large stallion, the fog thick, the distance uncertain. There was no question of propriety; there was only necessity.
Necessity, Thea thought a bit wildly, was becoming far too intimate.
"Sit forward," he said near her ear. "Hold the pommel."
"I know how a horse works."
"Then demonstrate it by not falling off."
Despite everything, indignation flared. "You are insufferable."
"So I am frequently told."
He clicked his tongue, and Tempest moved at once, not into a gallop but a careful, ground-eating walk that soon became a controlled trot where the land allowed. The Duke's arm came around her, not quite holding her, merely keeping the reins steady at either side. The arrangement was unavoidable. Also catastrophic.
Thea had ridden before, years ago, under her father's indulgent eye on a placid mare that considered haste an affront to dignity. Riding with Lucian Greymont was another matter entirely. Even with Tempest moving cautiously, each stride carried the force of contained power. The Duke's body behind hers adjusted instinctively to the horse's motion. She could feel the heat of him through layers of wool, the solid line of his chest against her back whenever the ground shifted.
"You followed me," she said after a time, because silence had become impossible.
"Yes."
"How did you know where I had gone?"
"Lottie told Mrs. Holloway. Mrs. Holloway told me."
"I see."
He gave a short, humorless sound. "I saw you from the west windows before the fog closed. When it did, you had not yet turned back."
The image entered her mind with dangerous clarity: the Duke at a high window, looking out over the moor, seeing her small figure against the heather and deciding, for whatever reason, to watch.
"You make a habit of monitoring the grounds?" she asked.
"I make a habit of not losing people on my estate."
His hand tightened fractionally on the reins. The movement brought his gloved knuckles against hers where she gripped the pommel.
"Have you lost people before?" she asked softly.
A pause. "Yes."
The single word held enough history to close the subject entirely.
The fog began to thin by degrees. First the line of a wall emerged, then the shape of a hawthorn tree, then the dark bulk of Greymont Hall itself appearing suddenly from the grey like memory made stone.
Thea let out a breath she had not realized she was holding.
"There," the Duke said. The tension in his voice altered, though it did not disappear. "You are safe now."
Safe. The word ought to have sounded comforting. Instead it lodged somewhere peculiar beneath her ribs.
They rode into the stable yard, where Roberts came at once, took one look at the pair of them, and said with admirable restraint, "Fog came up quick, then."
"It did," the Duke said.
Thea suspected the head groom, being a man of very few words, was also a man of very developed powers of inference.
The Duke dismounted first and turned immediately to help her down. Again his hands closed around her waist. Again the contact was brief, necessary, and far too memorable. Her boots met the ground. She would have stepped back at once, but the world tilted unexpectedly after the ride and she swayed.
His hand closed around her elbow.
"Steady."
"I am steady," she said, though she plainly was not.
"Of course." The word should have been dry. Instead it sounded tired.
The stable door banged open behind them. Mrs. Holloway emerged with Lottie at her shoulder and an expression that could have flayed paint.
"Miss Ashworth," the housekeeper said, then stopped as if unable to decide whether scolding or gratitude ought to come first. She settled on both. "You foolish girl. Thank heaven."
Thea, whose nerves had held admirably through fog and rescue, found herself absurdly close to tears at the sound of that plain relief.
"I'm sorry," she said again. "I didn't mean to cause alarm."
"No, you meant to take the air and nearly got yourself swallowed by the moor instead. Come inside this instant before you freeze solid." Mrs. Holloway's eyes shifted to the Duke. "And you, Your Grace, are soaked through."
Only now did Thea properly register it. In his haste he had evidently ridden out with no thought for weather or his own comfort. Moisture darkened his coat and clung to his hair. His boots were mud-spattered to the knee.
"I'm fine," he said.
"You are not. Neither of you are. Indoors. Now."
Mrs. Holloway herded them with such authority that resistance was clearly pointless. Within minutes Thea found herself in the small morning room, the fire built up high, a blanket over her knees and a cup of tea thrust into her hands. The Duke stood on the opposite side of the hearth in a dry coat someone had apparently fetched from nowhere, steam faintly rising from his boots.
For a few moments no one spoke. Lottie fled at Mrs. Holloway's command to bring more hot water. The housekeeper herself set another tray down between the blue velvet chairs, adjusted the teapot with military precision, and then, after one long assessing look from Thea to the Duke and back again, withdrew.
It occurred to Thea that she had never before been left alone with him in a room so explicitly domestic.
The realization made her take too large a swallow of tea.
"You needn't look as if you expect sentencing," the Duke said from the fire. "Mrs. Holloway reserves true judgment for servants who chip porcelain."
"How fortunate for me." The blanket was absurdly soft and somehow made dignity harder to maintain. "Though if there is to be a lecture, I suppose I have earned one."
"I have already given it. On the moor."
"With notable vigor."
His mouth shifted. Not quite a smile. Something near it. "You were not especially docile."
"No. I rarely find docility improves a situation."
"I had noticed." He remained where he was, one hand braced on the mantel, his face lit by the fire in profile. After a moment he said, more quietly, "I was harsher than I intended."
Thea looked up.
"You were frightened," she said.
He did not answer at once. The flames moved over the planes of his face, over the scar at his cheek, over eyes gone unreadable again.
"Yes," he said at last.
The honesty of it unsettled her more than any evasion could have done.
"I did not mean to alarm you. Or anyone."
"So you have said." He crossed at last to the chair opposite hers and sat, leaning forward to take up his own tea. "Intentions are often innocent. Consequences less so."
"That sounds suspiciously like philosophy."
"God forbid." He looked down into his cup. "It is simply experience."
The room fell quiet again, but not uncomfortably. Rain had begun at the windows, light at first, then steadier, rattling against the panes. The world beyond the glass disappeared into wet grey.
Thea followed his gaze to the pianoforte standing silent in the corner.
"Mrs. Holloway said it was your mother's," she said.
"It was. She had the windows put in for the light and the pianoforte moved here because she said music ought not be hidden in drawing rooms where no one actually listened." A shadow crossed his expression. "No one has played it since she died."
"Can you?"
He looked back at her, surprised. "A little. Not well enough to call it performance."
"That sounds like false modesty."
"No. Merely a fair estimate." He set his cup down. "Dr. Vale says I play as if I am trying to apologize to the instrument."
"Dr. Vale sounds unkind."
"He is a physician. They mistake bluntness for mercy." A beat passed. "He comes today, as it happens. He visits every fortnight, whether summoned or not. My grandmother pays him to concern himself with me."
"And does he?"
"Constantly."
As if the man himself had heard his name and chosen to prove the point, footsteps sounded in the corridor, followed by a knock and the entrance of a gentleman in his late fifties carrying a hat and gloves damp with rain. He had a broad, intelligent face, silver threaded through fair hair, and the alert, mildly rumpled air of a person who paid more attention to humanity than to tailoring.
"Ah," he said, taking in the scene at once. "I see I have arrived either at the end of a crisis or the start of a very interesting conversation."
"Neither," the Duke said. "Only bad weather and worse judgment."
Dr. Vale's eyes moved to Thea with open curiosity and immediate kindness. "Then I must be in the right house. You are Miss Ashworth, I presume. John Vale, at your service. Professional intruder, amateur observer of human folly."
Thea rose enough to incline her head. "How do you do, Dr. Vale?"
"Better now I know this place contains at least one sensible new person." He handed his wet things to a waiting footman and came nearer the fire. "Lucian, if you have let the lady walk herself half to Scotland on that moor again, I shall prescribe common sense and lock you both indoors."
"I did not let her do anything," the Duke said. "And she got no farther than the east rise."
"Which is quite far enough in fog." Dr. Vale accepted the tea Mrs. Holloway magically produced from nowhere and glanced between them, his expression becoming lightly thoughtful. "Well. No bones broken, no one drowned in a bog, and no frostbite. A remarkably efficient drama, all told."
"You are making me regret being found alive," Thea said.
Dr. Vale laughed outright. "Excellent. A sense of humor. We may keep you."
The Duke made an impatient sound, though one touched unmistakably with relief.
What followed was not, Thea realized after some minutes, a medical visit in any formal sense. Dr. Vale took the Duke's pulse and pronounced him mortal, inquired after an old shoulder injury apparently aggravated by damp weather, and then settled himself with tea as though he had come chiefly to watch the currents running through the room.
He drew Thea into conversation with infuriating ease. Within ten minutes he had learned where she had grown up, what her father had taught, and exactly how she had come to find medieval Latin more tolerable than sentimental poetry.
"A woman after my own heart," he declared. "I have long maintained that the sentimental poets have done more damage to clear thinking than laudanum."
"You say that only because no one ever wrote sonnets to country physicians," the Duke said.
Dr. Vale's brows rose. "You see, Miss Ashworth? He is improving already. Last winter I received entire visits from him conducted in monosyllables."
Thea glanced at Lucian before she could stop herself. There was resignation in his face, and something else, almost rueful.
"Perhaps," she said, "he is learning that conversation need not always end in disaster."
The words hung briefly in the room.
Dr. Vale, who was plainly too perceptive for anyone's comfort, looked into his teacup with exaggerated interest.
The Duke said, after a pause, "That remains to be seen."
Yet the tone of it was gentler than she expected.
Rain continued to drum softly against the windows. The fire burned lower. For the first time since coming to Greymont Hall, Thea felt herself not merely housed there but included, however provisionally, in some strange domestic orbit that revolved around weather and books and this difficult man who frightened easily only when other people were in danger.
It was not a safe sensation.
Which, naturally, made it all the more compelling.
At length Dr. Vale rose, declaring that he had inspected his patient sufficiently and would now go bully the cook into sending him away with seedcake. He bowed over Thea's hand with old-fashioned courtesy.
"Miss Ashworth, this house has needed fresh intelligence in it for years. Do not let it swallow you whole."
"I shall do my best, doctor."
He turned to the Duke. "And you, Lucian, try not to look as if the weather has personally insulted you. It is beneath the dignity of the peerage."
When he had gone, silence returned once more. But it was altered now, easier.
Thea set aside her empty cup and rose. "I ought to change before dinner. And perhaps write a humble apology to Mrs. Holloway in triplicate."
The Duke stood as well. "One apology will suffice. She likes you too much to sustain outrage for long."
Thea hesitated. There was something she wanted to say, and saying it felt perilous for reasons she could not entirely justify.
"Thank you," she said finally. "For coming after me."
His gaze met hers directly. No irony in it now. No anger.
"Of course," he said.
Such a simple answer. Such an impossible one.
As she moved toward the door, he added, quieter, "Miss Ashworth. The moors are beautiful. But they are not forgiving. If you wish to walk again, tell me. I'll have Roberts point out the safe tracks. Or…" He seemed to dislike the next words even as he spoke them. "I could show you myself."
The offer, so plainly reluctant and yet plainly sincere, struck her with almost absurd force.
"I should like that," she said.
For a heartbeat neither of them moved.
Then Thea inclined her head and left the morning room, carrying with her the warmth of the fire, the echo of Dr. Vale's laughter, and the altogether more dangerous memory of Lucian Greymont's arm around her in the fog.
Upstairs in the east wing, while Lottie fussed over a fresh dress and declared that near-death put a remarkable color into the cheeks, Thea sat at her small desk by the window and tried to be sensible.
The Duke had rescued her. That was all.
He had been angry because she was his responsibility while under his roof. Any decent man would have done the same.
And yet.
She could still hear his voice when he said, *for twenty minutes no one knew where you were.* Could still feel the steady force of his hands at her waist. Could still see the way fear had moved under his anger like fire beneath a grate.
Outside, rain veiled the moor. Greymont Hall held its silence close around itself. Somewhere below stairs, the household settled toward evening.
Thea looked out across the blurred gardens and admitted, because there was no one present to hear it, that the day had shifted something.
Not decisively. Not irreparably. But enough.
The moor had nearly swallowed her and returned her changed.
That, she suspected, was how dangerous places worked.
END OF CHAPTER FIVE
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