Maddy had too much pride to leave herself open to that kind of mockery. One needed money to keep up appearances and she had none. No money and no illusions.
She stopped beating the eggs and put the fork down. “Why didn’t you tell me you’d recovered your memory? Why keep it a secret?”
“I told you before. I wanted to catch Harris in the act, and you would have booted me out. As today has proved.” He linked his hands behind his head, as if pleased with his answer and rocked back on two legs of the chair.
“When Mr. Harris was doing that I was hoping the chair would break,” she observed, and sloshed some buttermilk into the mix.
He grinned. “Me, too.”
She eyed the chair. “He certainly weakened it.”
All four chair legs instantly resumed their place on the floor.
That wiped the smile off his face, she thought. “So it was all about catching Harris?”
“Yes.”
She didn’t believe a word of it. She sifted flour into the basin. “You could have slept comfortably at Whitethorn, then come back here in the morning.”
She put a knob of butter in a pan and put it by the fire to melt. “There was no reason for anyone to connect the Honorable Nash Renfrew to me.” She added the melted butter to the pancake mix and beat it vigorously.
“Hang it all,” he said irritably. “If you must know, it was vanity, pure and simple. I couldn’t arrive at Whitethorn in only one boot, not on my first night as the new master. I’d look ridiculous. One needs to make an entrance for that kind of thing, you know—make an impression, begin as you mean to go on.”
“Fustian!” She covered the bowl of pancake batter with a clean cloth, and as she placed the bowl on a shelf to sit, the answer came to her. She knew why he’d stayed on in her cottage. The mystery was why he didn’t want to admit it. The last of her anger drained away.
“Fustian?” he repeated when she returned to the table.
“You’re a fraud, Nash Renfrew,” she said softly. “You stayed here, you slept on that cold, hard floor for one reason only: to protect me and the children from the Bloody Abbot.”
“Well, of course I did,” he said, looking embarrassed. “What sort of fellow would I be to leave you in a fix like that, to go on my merry way after all you’d done for me?”
So, she thought. It was gratitude, pure and simple. And gallantry. Repayment in kind. So much for morning dreams and foolish hopes.
And if he’d left her in a worse mess when he left than she’d been in when he arrived, it was nobody’s fault. Not his, not hers. One of life’s accidents.
Thirteen
“So who are you, Mr. Nash Renfrew?” Maddy asked. She’d made them both a cup of rose hip and mint tea and sat down at the table to drink it. “I know you’re the brother of the Earl of Alverleigh, and Sir Jasper’s nephew—and please accept my condolences on the death of your uncle.”
He nodded in acknowledgment, and she continued. “But apart from the fact that you’ve been living abroad, I know nothing else about you.”
“I’m a diplomat,” he told her. “I’ve been posted to Russia for the last few years, living in St. Petersburg and Moscow.”
“St. Petersburg,” she exclaimed. “I’ve heard it’s very beautiful.”
“It’s the most beautiful city I’ve ever been to, with the possible exception of Venice. They call St. Petersburg the Venice of the north.” It felt so peculiar, sitting here, exchanging polite chitchat like strangers over a table, when he’d slept with her in his arms. Nash sipped his tea. He was even used to the taste of her strange brews.
“And do you like being a diplomat?”
“I love it,” he said simply. “I can’t imagine doing anything else. Travel, intrigue, glittering palaces, and political fencing in the dark, and all the while, I’m serving my country.”
“So you’re not planning to become a squire on the land.”
He laughed and shook his head. “Far from it. I’ve been granted leave of absence to untangle the affairs of Uncle Jasper, among other things. I gather he grew rather muddled toward the end.”
She shook her head. “Not muddled so much as very frail. He couldn’t leave his bed, but I used to visit him often, and his mind was quite clear until the last few weeks, when the laudanum the doctor prescribed made him very groggy.”
“I see.” So the financial discrepancies he’d discovered were not the result of an old man’s forgetfulness. Marcus had written to him in Russia, saying he sensed something was amiss. Marcus had a nose for that sort of thing.
