Trial by Desire (Carhart 2)

“You’ll do it,” Plum finally repeated, looking off at a speck of dirt on the ground. He said the words as if Ned had just announced that not only did he plan to save a useless horse, he had five heads.

And no wonder. Gentlemen offered to pitch hay approximately as often as they sported five heads. And a marquess’s heir was no common day-laborer to dirty himself with a pitchfork. But then, Ned wasn’t precisely a common marquess’s heir, either. He needed to do some thing to bleed off the excess energy he felt. It was beginning to come out in fidgets; if he didn’t do something about it, it would never dissipate.

Instead, it would go careening off at the first opportune moment. Or, more like, the first inopportune one, as he’d learned by experience.

“This is a joke?” Plum asked, bewildered. “You always were one for jokes, when you were a child.”

Oh, the inopportune moments of his childhood.

“I’m perfectly serious. I’ll manage it.”

Over the past few years he’d learned he could contain the restiveness, his simple inability to just stop. All he had to do was channel that excess energy into physical tasks. The more mundane, the more repetitive, the greater the strain on his muscles, the better it worked.

Plum simply shook his head, no doubt washing his hands of his master’s madness. “Cart’s already in the field,” he said.

Ned found the cart in question half an hour later. Champion watched him, his eyes lowered, yards away at the fence. Pitching hay into a cart was excellent work—back-straining and tiring. Ned could feel his muscles protest with every lift of the fork. His back ached in pain—the good sort of pain. He worked through it.

One hayrick. Two. The sun moved a good slice in the sky, until Ned was past the point of tiredness, past the point of shoulder pain, until his muscles burned and he wanted nothing more than to set down the pitchfork and leave the work to the men Plum would undoubtedly send.

But he didn’t. Because not only did this bleed off all that extra intensity, this was good practice. While there were days like today, when he felt vigorous and invincible, there also came times when he wanted nothing more than to simply come to a halt.

Those were the poles of his life: too much energy, almost uncontainable, followed by too little. When the next pole came riding ’round, he’d be ready for it again.

For now, though, he pitched hay.

CHAPTER FIVE

KATE FOUND her husband’s coat carelessly tossed across a fence rail. She’d trudged down a muddy footpath in search of him. The trail meandered behind a short scrubby line of trees, past an old, weathered line of fence. In the distance, ducks gabbled peacefully.

By the time she found him, her dress, once pristine, had picked up a band of mud at the hem. The starch of her collar had become limp against her skin. Not quite the way she’d wanted to confront her husband.

He, on the other hand… Ned had stripped to his shirtsleeves. His dark waistcoat hung open. He was wielding a pitchfork with the deft efficiency of a farmhand. Beneath the unbuttoned waistcoat, she could see the loose folds of his shirt swinging in time to his work. He had no cravat. A moment’s search found that white length of cloth draped near his coat.

The other gentlemen of her acquaintance would have looked foolish, without the armor of their clothing to hide thin shoulders, or the bulge of their bellies. But Ned had an air about him, not of disorder, but of casual confidence. Perhaps it was the self-assured rhythm he’d adopted. That uncivilized swagger suited him.

He had never seemed dangerous before he left, and she felt no fear now. And yet there was something different about him. Too casual to seem arrogant; too controlled to come off as happy-go-lucky. He’d changed.

He had a touch of the carefree ruffian about him even now, when he thought nobody was watching but a solitary, skittish horse. Champion huddled on the opposite end of the pasture, ears plastered against his head.

Ned was friends with Harcroft. He’d been the one to introduce the man to Lord Blakely and his wife. Anything he discovered—and as her husband, Ned had the legal right to discover a great deal from Kate—would ruin all of her carefully laid plans. He was already ruining her plans. He had unquestioningly taken the side of Lord and Lady Blakely. He had ushered Harcroft in with hospitality. And he would want to know—quite reasonably, he would think—how his wife spent her time. His presence would impede Kate’s ability to communicate with Louisa. How could she see to her friend’s safety if she couldn’t even visit her?

No. Even if he didn’t know it himself, her husband was a danger to her. The slightest word to him, carelessly spoken, could be repeated. In the blink of an eye, Louisa could be exposed.

He was dangerous in a more subtle way, too.

Five minutes of conversation, and she could still feel the mark his finger had left on her chin. Her hand bore an invisible imprint, where he’d laid his atop it. Five minutes, and he’d stirred her to laughter.

He had not heard her approach, and so she had the chance to watch him. He finished moving the last of the hay into the cart and set the pitchfork down slowly. He stripped off his leather gloves, one by one, then pulled off the waistcoat and laid it on the tongue of the cart, next to the gloves and his cravat. Then he stretched and took a clay jug off the cart. Instead of drinking from it, though, he held it above himself and poured a thin stream of water over his head.

His hair, already glistening from exertion, matted to the sides of his head. His white shirt turned translucent and clung to his chest.

Oh, heavens. Kate’s breath stopped. The intervening years had been very kind to him. Fabric adhered to defined muscles—not thick, like a laborer’s, but lean and rangy, like a fencer’s.

It was abominably unfair that he should leave for years and come back looking like that.

She felt the glorious unfairness of it bite deep in her chest.

Kate was not the only one watching. Some twenty yards distant stood the animal he had impetuously purchased today. The servants must have seen to it, because someone had transformed the beast from bedraggled to…slightly less bedraggled. The harness had been removed, and its dull coat had been brushed. Those small hints at grooming underscored how far the animal had yet to come. There were hollows where the animal should have sported muscle and worn spots where the ill-fitting harness had rubbed skin bare.

Ned was not talking to the animal, not even in the low, gentle tones he’d used earlier that morning. For that matter, he didn’t act as if he was even aware that it stood so many yards distant. Instead, he picked up his discarded waistcoat and patted its pockets, as if searching for something. He plucked out a little sack and walked away.

The horse—Champion, Ned had called the beast—watched him warily, turning sidelong to keep one eye on him as he walked. Ned whistled tunelessly and peered off into the distance, out at the short, scrubby stretch of trees that blanketed the nearby hill. Just as casually, he began tossing a tiny object from hand to hand. Kate caught a glimpse of white as it danced back and forth a few times, before he lobbed it off into the yellowing grass. He threw it with a sidelong motion, as if he were skipping a stone on the sea of shorn stubble.

Kate took two steps closer, her hands closing on the fence rail.

Champion’s nostrils flared at Ned’s sudden movement. He backed away, hastily. Ned turned from the horse. As he did, he caught sight of Kate. He stopped dead, and the small smile he’d been wearing slipped away. He didn’t say a word. Instead, he walked back to the cart. Once there, he donned his waistcoat and then his cravat, pulling the cloth around his neck. He tied the knot w

ith grave finality. Then he advanced on her.

Behind him, Champion laid his ears back in dire warning to any predators that might attack. He stamped his feet—once, twice. Then he trotted forward, lowered his head, and lipped up whatever Ned had thrown at him.

Ned still hadn’t said anything. But as he came upon her, he put his hand in that sack again. He set another object on the fence post in front of him. In the sunlight, the thumb-sized object gleamed like a lump of white porcelain.

“Come,” he said to Kate. “Walk with me.”

Kate’s corset seemed to tighten. Hot lines of whalebone pressed into her ribs while she tried to draw in a pained breath. Some trick of the light made his eyes appear darker, almost black; by contrast, the afternoon sunlight tinted his brown hair halfway to gold.

Shaving had revealed the strong line of his jaw. But he could still have used a valet’s services to trim his hair. The ends, still dripping water, curled into his eyes. Slowly, he lifted one hand and brushed those strands back.

It struck her as monstrously unfair. When Kate’s hair fell into her eyes, it looked blowsy. On her husband, the untidiness seemed nonchalant and approachable. And yet, if she were to approach him with the truth of what she’d done…

When they’d married, she’d thought he had an essential sweetness to him, a kindness. Perhaps that was why she had agreed to marry him. Marriage was a frightening business for a woman; one never knew what one’s husband might do. The man she’d married would never have condoned what Harcroft had done to his wife.

But this man? It had looked as if he had left a white rock atop the post. But as she walked up to it, the object he’d left shone innocently up at her. Her husband might have been careless and thoughtless, but he had never been cruel. A man who fed a wary horse—she sniffed the air delicately—peppermints was not the sort of man to make her fear for her safety.