Romney Marsh Trilogy: A Gentleman by Any Other Name / The Dangerous Debutante / Beware of Virtuous Women

“Coming into Maidstone ahead!”

Julia blinked herself awake at the sound of the groom’s shout and looked out the off window yet again, happy to see the beginnings of civilization once more.

Within an hour she and Alice were settled in a lovely large room at one of the many inns along the water. Alice had been washed, slipped into a night rail, had gingerly nibbled on buttered bread and milky tea and was once again sound asleep, now between sweet-smelling sheets.

And Julia was hungry. This surprised her, but she trusted her stomach to know best, so she washed her face and hands, frowned at her no-longer-neat hair, tucked Buttercup into the bed beside Alice, locked the door behind her and took herself downstairs to search out the common room.

“Not in there, Miss Carruthers. Lord knows the grief you could come to if you were to encounter my coachman again while you’re still of a mind to boil him in oil,” she heard Chance Becket say just as she was about to step across the threshold into a low-ceilinged room sparsely peopled with farmers and travelers. “I’ve arranged for a private dining room.”

She turned about to see that he had changed out of his hacking clothes and into a finely tailored dark blue jacket over fawn pantaloons. His hair, damp and even more darkly blond, had been freshly combed and clubbed at his nape. He looked fresh and alert and entirely too handsome to be smiling at her, to even know her name. “It was not the coachman who ordered us to all but fly to the coast. And I doubt, sir, that it is customary for the nanny to break bread with the employer.”

Chance laughed, doubtful that anything so mundane as convention ever gave this woman much pause. If it did, she wouldn’t have taken a step out of her chamber before doing something with that thick mop of hair that looked as if she’d spent the day scrubbing floors. “Perhaps you require a chaperone?”

“Oh, don’t be silly. I’m a plain, aged old maid of nearly one and twenty. Nobody cares,” Julia said, absentmindedly pushing a stray lock of straight blond hair behind her ear as she felt her cheeks begin to flush. Why on earth had she told him her age? “Where, sir, is the private dining room? I’m starved.”

He gestured toward the hallway leading away from the small square foyer, and Julia had no choice but to precede him down the hall.

“In here,” Chance said, stepping ahead of her and pushing back the door that was already ajar. “Shall I leave it open—to ease an old maid’s sensibilities, I mean?”

Julia blinked rapidly, for she was suddenly so stupidly missish that she actually believed she might cry. “Now you’re being facetious. I’m the nanny, a simple domestic servant. Just do sit down, sir, so that I may.”

“You are many things, Miss Carruthers,” Chance said as they sat down on either side of the narrow wooden table, “but I am afraid that the role of servant is not one of them, at least not by nature. Tell me, have you ever considered the occupation of despot? I do believe you’d excel at it.”

Julia picked up a still-warm roll, ripped it into three pieces, then reached for a knife and the butter pot. It was time for a change of subject. “How long will you remain at Becket Hall before returning to London, sir? I had thought you had planned only to deliver us there, but the amount of luggage you’ve ordered brought with you seems to contradict that thought.”

“Oh, don’t pretty it all up with fine words, Miss Carruthers,” Chance said, using his fork to skewer a fat slab of pink ham and put it on his plate. “You poked about in my bedchamber, tallying up bits of luggage the way a headmaster counts noses. And you’re alarmed that I might actually remain at Becket Hall above a day, because nothing would make you happier than seeing the last of me. Oh, and I am a horrible parent to Alice. Correct?”

Julia chewed on a piece of roll, swallowed, then smiled. “Correct, Mr. Becket. Except for that last little bit. I don’t think you are a horrible parent, because Alice seems to love you, and children are the very best judges of people. After dogs, I suppose. But you’re not very attentive or perceptive when it comes to your child, are you? Most of your gender aren’t, leaving such things to the females. My father, I believe, was an exception, as he was forced to raise me alone.”

Chance leaned back on his chair, rather amused about her reference to dogs. “So following that thought—and having known you now for nearly four and twenty hours—I can conclude that it’s the mothers, then, who for the most part teach their children about tact and thinking before speaking and refraining from invading another’s privacy and the art of showing respect—that sort of thing?”

Julia lowered her gaze to her plate to find that she’d loaded it with ham and cheese from the platter in the middle of the table. Yet suddenly she had lost her appetite.

“Come, come now, Miss Carruthers. Consider this a necessarily delayed interview as to your qualifications to ride herd on my daughter, as the first was rather slapdash, to say the least. I begin to worry that, raised entirely by your father, as you say you were, you are not the one to help mold Alice to be a respectful, conformable child.”

Clearly the man was now driving home his own point with the head of a hammer. She was being reminded just who she was—and who she was not. And the pity of it was, she could not afford to push him any further, unless she wanted to be left here, in Maidstone, to fend for herself. “I’m her nanny, sir, her nurse, and not her tutor or her governess. I believe you can safely leave her teachings to others. I’m here to…to hold the chamber pot.”

“Quite,” Chance said, liking this woman better when she wasn’t keeping herself in check. He’d had seven years of society women, of women never saying what they meant, what they felt—if, indeed, they felt anything. Miss Carruthers was more like his sisters, none of whom suffered fools gladly.

Which, he realized, would make him the current fool, wouldn’t it? “Very well, we’ll dispense with the interview now. Perhaps you’d like to hear more about Becket Hall? After all, you will be living there.”

“For how long, sir?” Julia asked, her curiosity overcoming both her uncomfortably real nervousness and her temper.

“For you, Miss Carruthers? For as long as you can stomach the place, I imagine. For Alice, until she is grown and ready for her season. I don’t wish for her to grow up in London, and my own estate is manned only by a skeleton staff, which is why I’ve arranged for her to be with the family. I’ll visit her, of course.”

“Really? And how long has it been since you’ve visited Becket Hall, sir? Alice has told me she’s never been there.”

Chance shifted in his chair. “She was taken there as an infant. Once. My wife didn’t care for…for the area.”

Julia had her own thoughts on what the man’s wife hadn’t cared for, but she’d begun to understand that saying what she thought wasn’t as accepted by society gentlemen as it had been by her father. Was his family horribly rustic, that his fine society wife couldn’t like them? If so, Julia knew she already liked them, sight unseen. “Romney Marsh can sometimes seem like a separate country, not part of England at all.”

Chance’s mind went back to his conversation with the War Office minister’s assistant. “I’ll agree that many of the inhabitants don’t seem to believe they are a part of the war going on with France.”

Julia nodded. “The Owlers. You are referring to them, aren’t you? But they smuggle to survive, Mr. Becket.”

“I understand their reasons, Miss Carruthers, and even sympathize, if that statement doesn’t startle you overmuch,” Chance told her. “We only wish they could understand our concerns. Besides the lost revenue, spies and information have been traded back and forth across the Channel with the unwitting help of the Owlers, as you call them. That has to stop.”

Julia bristled. She knew the history of smuggling along the Kent and Sussex coastlines. She’d daily drunk tea left as a gift after the smugglers had used her father’s church to store their haul before moving it inland. “Then the government has to do more than say it understands. Have the king raise the price paid for wool, sir. That would be my suggestion.”

Chance smiled, knowing he was speaking with a woman who’d been raised believing smuggling was nothing more or less than a fact of life. “Don’t bite off my head, Miss Carruthers. It’s my solution, as well, but I am here to tell you that a similar suggestion has already been offered and refused. And for good reason. We’re already strapped financing a war, remember?”

Julia shrugged, holding back a smile. How she adored a lively conversation, even a lively argument. “Better a war than an insurrection, sir. Or don’t you think it will come to that? My father worried that one day we will suffer France’s fate if we don’t learn the lessons of their revolution.”

Chance downed his mug of ale, good country ale made with Kent hops. “‘To write this act of independence we must have a white man’s skin for parchment, his skull for an inkwell, his blood for ink and a bayonet as pen.’”

Julia blinked, taken aback by the bloodthirsty statement. “I beg your pardon?”

“I was quoting Boisrond-Tonnerre, Miss Carruthers, not making a statement of my own. The words were said by Tonnerre, who served as one of Jean-Jacques Dessalines’ lieutenants, back in 1804. That’s when Haiti declared its independence after a fight begun by François Touissant, a slave whose master made the colossal blunder of allowing him to read about the so-glorious French Revolution. In other words, I am agreeing with your father, such an event is possible. And, yes, oppression makes such insurrections more than possible. Are you familiar with the history of Haiti, Miss Carruthers?”

Julia shook her head, interested and not a little impressed at Chance Becket’s so-smooth pronunciation of such tongue-twisting French names. “I’m sorry, I’m not. It’s an island? Is sugar grown there?”

Chance wished back his words. “Another time, Miss Carruthers. I was only thinking that there has already been one instance of a people copying the methods of the French Revolution. Indeed, we do not want another, most especially not here. Let me tell you about Becket Hall. Shall we walk?”

“I really should go upstairs to check on Miss Alice,” Julia said, getting to her feet.

“I’ll have a maid sent up to sit with her. Alice has no problem with strangers.”

Julia still believed she should return to Alice’s chamber, but she did long to hear about Becket Hall and the Becket family, as well as more about Haiti, of all places. “Very well,” she said, handing over the key to the chamber. “But wait, I’ll do it. I should go fetch my bonnet anyway.”

“Not if you have any pity for me, Miss Carruthers. The thing is close to an abomination, you know. Even that ridiculous bun is less offensive to the eyes.”

Julia went to raise a hand to her hair but caught herself in time. “One would assume you, too, were a motherless child, Mr. Becket, as that was quite an untactful remark.”

Chance did not smile. “Wait for me here, Miss Carruthers, doing your best to keep any opinions to yourself.”

Julia gave herself another short, pithy sermon on the benefits of knowing her place while also taking the time to munch on another slice of ham and tuck a roll into the pocket of her gown before her employer returned and led her out onto the street.

He turned to the left and then guided her around the side of the large building, down a gravel pathway to a bench that overlooked the River Medway. Or the River Wen. Julia only knew that Maidstone had been built on the banks of both waterways. Until the horrible mail coach ride to London that now seemed two lifetimes ago, she had never strayed more than a few miles from Hawkhurst, except for occasional trips to Rye with her father.

She sat, raising her face to the sun while she listened to the flow of water through the wheel of the mill on the opposite shore, the song of birds overhead…and concentrated on not thinking about the man sitting beside her. And there were flowers; flowers everywhere. Maidstone had been touted as the Garden of England, and now she knew why. “I still can’t smell the Channel, but we will tomorrow. How near is Becket Hall to the water?”

“All but too near when the tide comes in during a winter storm,” Chance said, a mental portrait of Becket Hall forming in his mind. “My father loves the sea.”

“And you don’t?”

This woman turned his every spoken word into a question about him. How did she do that? “I’ve sailed. Now, you’ll be with Alice at most times, but I know my family. They’re extremely informal and they’ll wish to include both of you in their day-to-day lives, so you’d best be prepared for that.”

Julia could sense tension building in the man, from his posture to the tone of his voice. “You disapprove?”