Looking up, he prayed she, like most females, had little ability to accurately estimate such things. The blank look on her face, and the frown that succeeded it, confirmed that beneath her shield, she was all female.
“I really couldn’t put a figure to it,” she admitted.
He met her gaze with unstudied innocence. “Perhaps you could show me the area used last year.” He brandished the list. “Together with this, that should give me enough to work with.”
She was suspicious; she searched his eyes, but he made very sure she would see nothing of his intent therein. Lips tightening, she pushed back from the desk. “Very well.”
Madeline led him out of the office, ridiculously conscious of him strolling with tigerish grace beside her. Quite aside from that novel and irritating sensitivity, there were few men who could make her feel…if not small, then at least not a physical match for them. Gervase Tregarth could make her feel vulnerable in a way few others could.
And he did.
On that one point, her instincts and her
intellect were as one: He was dangerous. To her. Specifically her. Aside from all else, because he could make her feel so.
Unfortunately, instinct and intellect reacted completely differently to that conclusion.
Shoving her burgeoning curiosity back into a mental box, she swept down the corridor to the garden door. Pushing through—he reached over her shoulder and held the door back, making her nerves quake—she marched into the gardens and headed down the path through the roses. He fell into step beside her, his strides easily matching her mannishly long ones.
Recalling that he’d been overseas with the army for the past ten and more festivals, she waved ahead. “We staged the festival beyond the gardens, in the park itself, closer to the cliffs. People could reach the site by the cliff paths as well as through the estate.”
Gervase nodded, idly surveying the gardens she led him through. The further they got from the house, the more he sensed a certain tension rising in her. No matter how she tried to hide it, he affected her, although he was reasonably certain she viewed that effect more as an affliction. She was very conscious of being alone with him.
“Last year we had sixteen local merchants as well as thirteen intinerant vendors who set up booths. We don’t need to provide the booths for them—they bring their own—but we do need to set aside specific spaces, and mark each with a vendor’s name, or they’ll shed blood over the best positions.”
“You’ll need to give me some indication of who takes precedence.” The path they were on continued beyond the garden into the heavily treed park. Although the clifftops and downs were largely devoid of trees, there were pockets such as this where the old forests still held sway. She shivered lightly as the shadows fell over them. He glanced around. “I’d forgotten how densely the trees grow here.”
“Only for a little way in this direction.” She gestured ahead to a clearing. The path led to it; afternoon sunlight bathed the coarse grass as they stepped out from beneath the trees.
She spread both arms, encompassing the entire clearing. “We needed all this space, and last year we had to put some booths and tents right up against the trees.”
Halting in the center of the expanse, Gervase slowly turned, estimating. “I think…” He looked at Madeline. “With luck, we should manage with the area between the forecourt gate and the ramparts.”
Head tilting, she considered, then nodded. “Yes, that should do.”
She hesitated, eyes on him; any minute she would suggest they return to the house. He glanced around again, then pointed to another path that led further from the house. “The cliffs are that way?”
She nodded. “Many came via the cliffs.”
“Hmm.” He set off in that direction, but listened intently; after a fractional hesitation, she followed. “We might have to open up some of the older gates—we usually only have the main one open, but with lots of people streaming in, the forecourt entry arch might get too crowded.”
“If you do”—he’d slowed enough for her to come up beside him—“you’ll need to put men—burly ones—on watch at each gate.” She grimaced and glanced at him. “After the first year here, we realized that multiple entries also meant multiple exits, and although most of those who attend are law-abiding, the festival is well known and attracts a small coterie of…”
“Poachers, scavengers and outright rogues?”
She grinned fleetingly. “Thieves and pickpockets mostly. We found that the best method to discourage them was to have men on watch visible at each entry. That was enough to deter them.”
He nodded. “We’ll do that.”
They reached the edge of the trees; a wide expanse of clifftop, verdant and green, opened up before them with the sea an encircling mantle of blue slate that stretched to the horizon. Just out from shore, a light breeze kicked up small white horses, sending them rollicking over the waves.
He slowed to an amble, but continued walking; she went with him, reluctantly perhaps but, like him, drawn to the view. To the incomparable sensation of standing just back from the cliff edge and feeling, experiencing, the raw, primal power of the windswept cliffs, the ever-churning sea and the sky, huge and impossibly wide, careening above.
It was an elemental magic any Cornishman responded to. Any Cornishwoman.
They halted, stood and looked. Drank in the sheer, incredible beauty, harsh, bleak, yet always so alive. To their left, Black Head rose, a dark mass marking the end of the wide bay. Far to their right, almost directly opposite where they stood, the castle sat above the western shore, keeping watch for invaders as it had for centuries.
Even as late as the early half of the previous year, there’d been a watch kept from the towers.