Chapter Fourteen

Steven had to stoop in the low tunnel, but he kept on. He called Rose’s name every few feet, echoed by the boy’s “Your Grace?” but silence was their only answer.

At every step, Steven dreaded to come across Rose, lying incoherent, ill, or worse. His entire being filled with panic. He knew the only way he’d relieve it was to find Rose, take her in his arms, and hear her whisper, “Hush, Steven, I’m all right.”

He’d plunged into the game of being Rose’s betrothed, at first to let Laura Ellis release herself from him, as well as for the fun of it. At least, that’s what he’d told himself. Steven knew now that he’d followed his instincts to latch on to Rose and not let her go.

She’d steadied him with gentle hands the night he’d fallen drunkenly into her, and Steven wanted her to steady him the rest of his life. He needed her. No—it went beyond need.

He loved her.

Steven had been telling her the past few days, in a light tone, that he considered them engaged in truth, and that they’d marry soon. Rose had laughed with him as though she thought him joking.

It was no joke. Steven spoke that way because he didn’t know how to be serious. Feared it.

When he found Rose, he would put her over his shoulder and run out of here with her. Then he’d shake a special license out of someone and marry her. Tonight.

She was the only woman he’d consider continuing his existence with.

“Rosie!” he yelled, his words echoing hollowly. “Answer me, damn it.”

“What’s that?” the boy behind him asked.

Steven halted. The boy darted around him, disobeying, as boys did, and pointed ahead of them. Steven flashed his lantern and saw nothing, but then the boy shielded the light and pointed again.

Steven saw it then, a dim outline of something square. A door?

“Behind me,” Steven said sternly as the boy started forward. The lad sighed and let Steven take the lead again.

The outline grew sharper as they neared it, and the air coming to them turned colder and less dank.

Steven could move swiftly even bent double, having had to run and stay within cover on many occasions in his career. He made it to the dim light to find it was indeed a door, or at least a set of boards nailed together to simulate one.

Steven shoved it open to nearly trip on stone steps on the other side. He hurried up these, finding at the top, in the mud, the precise pointed-toe print of one of Rose’s high-heeled boots.

But where had she gone after that? “Rose!” he shouted.

Barking answered him, faint and far away. Logically Steven knew it could be any dog, not necessarily the one from the Southdown estate, but he turned his steps toward the sound without pausing to think.

He shouted again, continuing his path toward the answering bark. Steven pushed through bramble and undergrowth beneath tall trees, the branches tearing at his coat. The boy surged on ahead, unafraid now, but it struck Steven that the lad wasn’t worried, because he knew exactly where they were.

“What’s over there?” Steven asked him. His heart was in his throat as he waited for the answer. An old well? A pit? A cliff?

“Come on, sir,” the boy said, running nimbly through the trees. Steven hurried to catch up with him.

The woods opened out into a large clearing so suddenly that Steven staggered to a halt. He dropped his lantern, which had already extinguished in the wind, his hand now too numb to hold it.

What was in the clearing had caused him to drop it. First he saw Rose. Second, he saw what Rose stood before—a house.

Not a house. A fairy castle. That was the only explanation. They’d run through the tunnel and emerged in cloud-cuckoo land, where miniature sugar-spun palaces dotted the landscape.

The house was small but done in such exacting detail it was as though someone had built a mansion and then shrunk it. It was two stories, the ground floor filled with many-paned windows, columns, and pediments over the windows and the double front door. The second floor was covered with a mansard roof, with scalloped gray-slate tiles. Dormer windows with curved peaks broke out from the roofline. Half of the cottage was covered with vine, which would bloom a riot of colors in the late spring and summer. Roses.

The columns on either side of the door had been carved with the same kind of vines, except these were covered with carved and painted roses—red, pink, yellow, and white. The roses met in the plaster molding above the door, twining together into a heart.

A garden had been planted around the house, barren now for winter, but the bushes were full and would be fuller in the growing season. It was neat and sculpted, again as though someone had taken the gardens of Versailles and given them a good rinsing until they were small enough to fit here.

Rose stood in the middle of this garden, wind buffeting her coat and hatless hair, staring at the door and its rose motif. She might have been caught in a spell, frozen here to stare at this house for eternity, or until her lover kissed her and woke her.

“Rose!” Steven called.

Rose turned around and saw him. So did the dog. Steven realized that with the wind rushing and roaring in the trees as it was, she’d not been able to hear his cries. She waved to him as the black dog loped to him, then Rose went back to studying the house.

“Isn’t this—” she began. Then “Oop!” as Steven barreled into her and dragged her off her feet. He spun around with her once, then set her back down and began kissing her.

Rose was all that was warmth and spice. Her mouth was a point of heat in the cold, her face sweetly smooth, flushed from the wind. Her body fit nicely into Steven’s arms. After her first start, she flowed against him, holding him as he held her.

She was alive, and whole, and well. Steven hugged her harder, pressing her to him, kissing her again and again. Rose laughed, and he kissed her smile, taking the whole of her into himself.

He was vaguely aware of the boy, who’d reached the house, patiently waiting with the dog until they finished the uninteresting bit.

Rose tried to push away from Steven, but he held her fast. “Rosie,” he breathed. “I thought I’d lost you.”

“I was waiting for you,” she said. Magical words in this magical place.

But what place was it? “Where are we?” Steven asked the lad.

“We call it the cottage,” the boy said, studying it. “Been here forever, my dad says. A lover’s nest from two hundred years ago. My dad says.”

The architecture put it in the very early Georgian period. Palladian, Steven thought it was called, when classic architecture was revived and Capability Brown had been sought to plan gardens.

The place wasn’t a ruin. The garden was neatly trimmed, the house painted, the roof tight.

“No one seems to be home,” Rose said. “I knocked, but had no answer. I didn’t like to simply go in.”

The boy shrugged. “No one lives here. There’s always a door open in the back.”

He led them around the side, Rose and Steven hand in hand, the dog trotting beside them.

The back was no less a palace than the front, but a short wing stuck out from it like an afterthought. A double Dutch door, with the bottom half opening independently of the upper, as might be found in any of the older cottages around here, opened as the boy raised the latch.

Rose and Steven stepped into a neat kitchen with a flagstone floor, and Rose let out a breath of relief. It was warm here, with a fire in the hearth, and tea things set out on the table. Stranger and stranger.

“I thought you said no one lived here,” Rose said to the boy.

The lad shook his head. “They don’t. But there’s caretakers.” He opened the door that led to the main house.

Whoever the caretakers were, they had kept the place very nicely. The architecture might be old, but the furniture was new, chair and sofas strewn with cushions and looking comfortable. The fireplace was stoked, andirons polished, and soft carpets covered the floor. The rose motif continued in the moldings at the top of the walls, in the medallions on the ceiling and above the fireplace, in the patterns on the carpets, and on the embroidered cushions.

The room beyond the sitting room was a dining room, likewise tidy, and a stair at the far end of that presumably went up to bedrooms above.

“Lucky woman,” Rose said, returning to the sitting room and looking around in wonder.

“What woman?” Steven, now out of the wind, his panic dissipated, started to grow angry. “Why the devil did you run off like that, lass? And who shut you in the summerhouse? It was Albert, wasn’t it? I’m going to kill him—slowly.”

“I didn’t fancy staying in there,” Rose said. “The dog found the secret passage, and when I got to the other end and saw the roof of this house through the trees, I admit to curiosity.”

“Bloody hell, Rose.”

Steven caught her hand between his, he still needing to reassure himself that she was all right.

“I meant that the woman this house was built for was lucky.” Rose glanced around the sitting room again. “Whoever commissioned it for her must have loved her very much.”

Steven slid his arm around her. “I wonder if she was called Rose,” he said. “This place suits you.”

Rose met his gaze, showing no remorse that she’d led him on a merry chase. Perhaps she didn’t realize how much the bottom had dropped from Steven’s world when he’d found her gone.

“I like it very much,” Rose said, giving him the little smile that turned over his heart. “Who does it belong to, I wonder?”

“It belongs to you, Your Grace.”

Rose tried to spring apart from Steven at the woman’s voice, but Steven wasn’t letting her go. Not again.

The woman who’d entered looked like any other in these parts, plump and a bit worn by time, dressed in a plain gown with an apron, her graying hair in a neat bun. She looked like any housekeeper or cook in a country home.

“I beg your pardon?” Rose asked her, flushing.

“We’ve been waiting for you a long time, dear,” she said. “I mean, Your Grace. We’ve been keeping the place, just like he asked. Thought you’d never arrive.”

Maybe Steven had stepped into a fairy tale, like the ones he read to Sinclair’s children on occasion. Eight-year-old Andrew liked the gory and gruesome ones the best.

Rose stared at the woman, as nonplussed as Steven. “Arrive? From where? Who asked you to keep it?”

“The duke, of course. The one who’s passed on, I mean. Young Lord Charles, as my mum knew him when he was a boy, and she his nanny.”

“Oh, I see. Then you are Mrs. . . .”

“Winters, dear. I married Mr. Winters, who was steward before our son took over. Our son tried to tell us matters were bad for you, but we thought that after the will was sorted you’d come. You didn’t, not until now, but we kept on being paid to keep the place, and we saw no reason not to. Lord Charles was always a kind man.”

“Yes, he was . . . but. . . .”

Steven broke in. “What Rose—Her Grace—means is that there was no mention of this house in the will.”

Rose laughed a little. “If there had been, I’m certain the new duke would have heard of it.”

“And come to turn the Winterses out and raze the place,” Steven finished darkly.

Mrs. Winters opened her hands. “I only know the instructions we received in a letter after Lord Charles had passed. We was to keep the house for you, but when you take possession, you can do with it as you please. Now, I’ve got tea almost ready. Would you like me to bring it in here for you? Or will you take it in the kitchen, where it’s a mite warmer?”