Fisherman offered information the House once used by Lord Keith during Bonaparte affair.
Nature of current dispatch unknown.
Nothing much—yethe could not shake the instinctive feeling that Mrs. Larkin’s calm façade concealed a depth of purpose equal to his own.
And as he laid down his pen, the wind rose outside, carrying the cries of gulls and the boom of the sea against the cliffs—a sound half like a summons, half like a warning.
CHAPTER 2
There was a stranger in town.
One did not live in a small community without everyone knowing everything within minutes of its occurrence. News ran here faster than the tide turned, and with as little regard for who might wish to stop it.
It ran even faster where Belair House was concerned, for that neat stone dwelling on the outskirts had always attracted stories. It had been built as a country cottage for Captain Thomas Elphinstone, Royal Navy, set in an elevated position with extensive surrounding views. The house was famous, not for its size or grandeur, but for one extraordinary summer in 1815 when Elphinstone’s kinsman, Admiral Lord Keith, had made himself incommunicado there whilst he dealt with the correspondence relating to the fate of Napoleon Bonaparte, then held aboard theBellerophonwhich was moored in the Sound.
Locals still liked to say that Belair’s dining room had once been a Council of War. Elphinstone’s nephew, so the tale went, had stood at the doorway with dagger drawn when Lord Keith opened the Admiralty dispatch ordaining Bonaparte’s exile to the island of St. Helena. It was a story the baker’s boy repeated with relish, and the older folk nodded over with the sombresatisfaction of those who had lived through great events, even from a safe distance.
Now the house belonged to a widow and her flock of girls. It was perhaps natural that the locals should watch it keenly.
Elise, the Widow Larkin, first heard of the stranger from Mrs. Prowse, who kept the bakery, and who had had it from her cousin’s husband, Mr. Tully, who drove the carrier’s cart and had seen the gentleman dismount at the George with a valise of good leather and a manner that suggested he was accustomed to better inns.
“A ’andsome gent, Mrs. Larkin,” Mrs. Prowse had declared, her eyes alight as she handed over the week’s order. “Staying at the posting-house, no less. Mr. Tully says he speaks like a London swell and looks like he’s been somewhere far off, what with that coat and the cut of his jaw.”
This, in turn, had been embroidered by the time it had passed through Betsy, the scullery maid, who had gone to fetch flour and returned wide-eyed.
“He be a writer, ma’am,” Betsy reported breathlessly in the school kitchen, flour on her nose and importance in every syllable. “Come to put our place in a book, so Mrs. Prowse says. Tall as the church steeple and twice as grand, with boots you could see your face in.”
There was very little, Elise thought, that she could care less about than some gentleman lodged at the George. Sailors and men—she had quite enough to do with arithmetic, mending, and twenty girls whose tempers and tears kept the house very well supplied with theatre. She had dismissed the notion of the stranger with a lift of the brow and a murmur of, “I daresay he will be gone by the week’s end.”
No one of consequence stayed here for long. He was dismissed as quickly as he’d been mentioned.
At least, so she thought until she saw him walking about her property.
“Jane, we are out of ink again,” Elise observed, looking up from the accounts. “Did the last shipment prove deficient, or are my young ladies composing novels in secret?”
Jane Archer, seated opposite her at the long table with a basket of stockings in her lap, laughed and set down her darning egg. She was a little younger than Elise, with brown hair that refused to lie flat and a pair of green eyes that had not yet lost the trick of amusement, despite all the Navy had done to her.
“I shall interrogate them individually, if you wish,” she said. “I suspect Miss Forbes. She writes to her mama every day, I am quite persuaded, whether she owns it or not. As for the ink, the last pot arrived half-dried, and the rest has gone to sums and French verbs. I will ask Tom Headley to bring another cask from the town.”
“Do so,” Elise said, making a note in the margin. “And tell Mr. Headley that if they insist on sending us more lumps than liquid, I shall take my trade elsewhere, even if ‘elsewhere’ happens to be forty miles off.”
Jane nodded, then tilted her head. “Speaking of Mr. Headley, he brought back news from town when he fetched the coal. There is a stranger at the George.”
“So I understand,” Elise replied drily. “Mrs. Prowse told me and Betsy, then Betsy told the entire kitchen. I expect Cook is convinced he is a highwayman in disguise, and Betsy has dreams of marrying him before the week is out.”
Jane’s mouth twitched. “Cook hopes he is a gentleman fallen on hard times, that she may rescue him by the excellence of her pies. Betsy is certain he is a poet. Mr. Headley maintains he is a writer, which, I confess, might come to the same thing.”
“Or to nothing at all,” Elise said. “Writers must write about something. Stonehouse will not bear the weight of an epic,but perhaps a poem or two, Lord save us.” The last thing Elise needed was a handsome poet filling her girls’ heads with dramatic nonsense.
“I do not know,” Jane said thoughtfully. “The sea is epic enough for me. Mrs. Prowse says he carries a notebook and looks at the cliffs as if he means to measure them. That sounds very like serious intention.”
Elise shook her head and returned her attention to the figures marching down the page. Coal, paper and ink; there was very little poetry in a school’s accounts. “He will be gone soon, however poetic,” she said. “He will grow tired of the wind and the sea and the bread and the gossip, and seek out a fashionable town where the stories have more feathers.”
“Possibly,” Jane allowed. “Still, it is something new, and one must be grateful for novelty where one can find it. You do not even wish to wonder who he is?”
“No.” Elise dipped her pen with more force than was strictly necessary. “We have quite enough gentlemen to think of at a distance—the fathers, the uncles, the brothers who send their daughters, nieces and sisters here. I have no leisure to add some holiday visitor to the list.”
Jane’s eyes softened at that, in the way they did when she thought Elise did not see. “Perhaps you are right, but?—”
