A Delicate Deception Read online

  Dedication

  To internet friends

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Acknowledgments

  The Regency Impostors Series

  About the Author

  By Cat Sebastian

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter One

  Derbyshire, 1824

  After only a year of living at Crossbrook Cottage, Amelia had worn a path along the perimeter of the property, a comforting length of bare earth she had trod hundreds of times before, tracing the boundaries of her small, self-contained universe. Here, in a part of Derbyshire sufficiently remote that she could depend upon never being invited to a gathering larger or grander than a card party at the vicarage, but not so far from good roads that her friends and family would be deterred from making brief visits, she felt safe.

  Safe, but also ready to weep from boredom.

  She hadn’t meant to stay away this long, but the thought of returning to London made her heart race and dread pool in her belly. She was not by nature a quiet and retiring person, but if this isolation was the price of her sanity, she would pay it. Despite the assurances of well-meaning friends, she did not even think this was hyperbole: that last year in town, leading up to . . . the incident, she had feared herself to be on the verge of something very much like madness.

  To keep herself from clawing the cottage walls from sheer boredom, she kept to a routine. Nothing too precise, just a knowledge that she would leave the house as soon as it was light enough to see the path before her, and that she would return home in time for a late breakfast. At this hour she could be certain of running into nobody at all, not the gardener, not the vicar’s officious wife, not so much as a stray dairymaid.

  At least that was what she had supposed before she saw the giant. He lumbered along the path she had worn with her own feet as if he weren’t intruding on her property, her quiet, her peace of mind. And then, with God as her witness, he tipped his hat as he passed her by. The next day he did the same, and accompanied his hat tip with what sounded like an oddly old-fashioned “good day to thee.” Infuriating.

  By the third day she begrudgingly concluded that he was not a proper giant, merely a large man with a fondness for trespass. Surely he was twice as large as any man needed to be. Worse—because he could not be held responsible for the breadth of his shoulders or the length of his legs—was the fact that he persisted in tipping his hat to her and murmuring a greeting. She would have thought that from her demeanor (eyes unwaveringly set on the path before her, shoulders back, face unsmiling) he might have gathered that she did not wish to acknowledge his presence. She had the rules of etiquette all but etched into her skin, and knew to a certainty that even in the country, ladies were under no obligation to acknowledge any man to whom they had not been properly introduced. That precept was firmly implanted in her mind, along with all the rest of her mother’s teachings, and which rural solitude had for the most part rendered blessedly irrelevant. But still the giant tipped his hat, and did it with such cool courtesy that Amelia felt the fury down to her bones.

  “Why not take your walk at another hour?” Georgiana asked when Amelia returned to the cottage, snarling and hissing like an outraged badger.

  Amelia flopped into the well-worn chintz chair and glared at her friend. “That would be letting him win.”

  “Do you suppose he’s aware that you’re engaged in a contest?” Georgiana asked without looking up from the latest Ladies’ Register. She lounged on the sofa, her head on one end and her feet on the other, a cat wedged between her face and the armrest. If for Amelia the country promised solitude, for Georgiana it allowed a degree of idleness that Amelia found frankly inspiring. After over a decade of working as a governess, Georgiana had taken the notion of retiring to the country very literally. She was one of the few people on the planet whose company Amelia felt equal to bearing, partly because most days she was as still and silent as a piece of furniture.

  Amelia sniffed. “That hardly matters. I know it is, and that’s enough.”

  Georgiana turned a page. “Ooh, Amelia, this would suit you.” She held up a page featuring a fashion plate. “Green velvet, with a pelisse and bonnet to match, I should think.”

  “It’s nearly August. Why are you thinking of green velvet?”

  “Fine, green satin, have it your way.”

  “I didn’t agree to any such thing,” Amelia protested, laughing. “Besides, where on earth would you have me wear a satin gown of any color?” She gestured at their surroundings, indicating the parlor with its plain white curtains and its shabby rug, its single sofa and the table where they took their meals. Looking around, she felt a sense of relief. No stifling gowns. No audience eagerly awaiting her next misstep. Only this little room and the other equally neat and tidy rooms in this cottage. It was a refuge, a sanctuary, the first place on earth she had ever felt that she could rest.

  “You can have nice things without needing them,” Georgiana said. “We dine from china when I daresay tin cups or slabs of tree bark would do just as well.” She turned the page of her magazine. “Where do you think your giant lives? Heaven knows he can’t live nearby or we would have heard about it.”

  Amelia had wondered the same. The nearest village was a mile away, but it was little more than a hamlet. If he were a visitor who had come to enjoy Derbyshire’s scenic vistas, he would hardly walk the same route each morning. If he were a newcomer, Amelia would have already heard of his arrival ten times over from her maid and manservant, and Georgiana would have had the news from every neighbor in the parish.

  There was another possibility, which was that Pelham Hall had been let. Amelia strongly preferred not to think of that. The entire appeal of this place was its isolation, and a neighbor within walking distance would ruin that. When she had taken this house, the Pelham Hall land agent who handled the transaction in the owner’s absence assured her that the manor was half ruined: quite picturesque but sadly unfit for human habitation. There had been a fire some years earlier, and the place had stood empty and crumbling ever since.

  Still, the next day she took a walk up to Pelham Hall to put her mind at ease. The east half of the house stood a blackened ruin, its windows gaping ominously. The west half appeared to be intact, but still desolate. Weeds obscured the gravel drive and ivy grew over the door. There was no sign of anybody having been there recently: no cart tracks, no windows opened for airing, not a single sound other than the birds chirping and the leaves rustling in the wind. Beside her, Nan growled.

  “I quite agree,” she told the dog. “Highly unpleasant and unfit for humanity. Thank heavens.”

  She returned home, her heart lighter in her chest.

  Sadly, morning strolls turned out to be less enjoyable when they were part of a one-sided war of attrition. Amelia considered walking in the evening instead, but it was the summer, and farmers and cottagers were out and about until the sun finally set at nine. Just about the last thing Amelia needed was to stumble upon a courting couple. Roaming ab
out the countryside before dawn or after dusk seemed a good way to break an ankle, not to mention give Georgiana fits from worry. So every morning at her appointed hour, Amelia took her old-fashioned wide-brimmed rush hat off the peg by the door, wrapped herself in a shawl she could remove once the sun began to warm the hillsides, and headed off for a walk as if it weren’t all about to be ruined by the stranger.

  Nan, as per her habit, materialized from the stables and began trotting hopefully a few paces behind Amelia. Nan was a mongrel who had liberated herself from the thankless drudgery of herding sheep in order to live off the land. Except that Amelia was almost certain Keating, her manservant, slipped the beast some table scraps, and she wouldn’t be shocked to discover that the dog bedded down by the fire in Keating’s rooms.

  As Amelia made her way down the familiar lane, Nan drew closer. While she liked to think that Nan joined her either as protection or out of a sense of adventure, she suspected that the dog thought Amelia was a sheep. Well: fluffy hair, general roundness of form, she supposed she could not blame the dog. Nan seemed to believe that every living creature who got within ten yards of Amelia was a potential sheep rustler.

  “I haven’t any bread today,” she said to the dog, who had developed a bizarre fancy for the stale bread Amelia fed to the ducks who gathered at the bend in the brook. “You’re only going to be disappointed later when you realize you’ve wasted your time on me.” Nan looked up at her hopefully. “Fine, then. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  Nan barked, startling her out of her thoughts. Amelia looked up, expecting to see that a goose or duck had strayed into the path. But no, it was the giant. And he was standing right in front of her.

  Sydney could not quite see the woman’s face beneath the wide brim of her straw hat, but he could see enough to know he was being scowled at. The scowl was in the clench of her fists and the set of her shoulders; the very air around her was thick with her annoyance. Of more pressing concern was the woman’s dog: its hackles were up and it looked about to go for his throat. He had seen her with the dog often enough to know that this seemed to be the dog’s way of letting the world know his mistress was spoken for. Sydney approved in theory, even if in practice he did not much care for the prospect of being eaten. If young women had to walk about the countryside on their own, they ought to have excessively mean dogs with them. There was probably a charitable foundation somewhere whose aim was to pair every snarling cur with a wandering maiden. He would be certain to ask the next time he had to make pained conversation with one of the railway shareholders’ wives. If he ever got back to Manchester, that was.

  To that end, he was headed for the village to post a letter. With an aim to dispatching his errand as quickly as possible, he made to step around the woman and her dog, and brought his hand up to tip his hat.

  “Don’t you dare,” she snapped. It was the first time he had heard her speak, and he was appalled to hear a plummy English accent. He had thought her a village girl, wearing that plain dress and raggedy hat. But instead she opened her mouth and that came out. Good Lord. He tried not to recoil.

  “I beg your pardon?” he asked stiffly, unsure as to what he dare not do.

  “Don’t you tip your hat to me. Not on my own property. Don’t even think about it. Not even once.”

  Was hat tipping a lewd gesture now? He was sufficiently unacquainted with the great and good of the land not to be sure it wasn’t. He would have to ask Lex, presuming the man weren’t lying dead in a ditch somewhere. “This isn’t your property,” he said instead. That much he knew to a certainty. He could see the boundaries of this part of the country as clearly as if his map were spread out before him.

  He thought he saw her flush under the brim of her hat. “Technically, it belongs to an absentee landlord”—she pronounced this as the vilest epithet—“as does most of this part of the countryside, but I hired Crossbrook Cottage for a full three years. I have all rights to the land from this lane to the canal.”

  So, this was the tenant of Crossbrook Cottage. His own tenant, he supposed. The Pelham land steward had mentioned such a circumstance. “No, you don’t,” he said. “This is a cattle path. There’s a right of way along this lane as far as—”

  “I’ve never seen a cow on this path nor any sign a cow has ever been here,” she protested, her chin in the air. “Nor a sheep, nor any person other than you. Besides, you aren’t a cow. How can you claim a right to a cattle path?”

  He shrugged. He had reached the end of his knowledge of both rights of way and of cattle. “Couldn’t tell you,” he said.

  “And who are you to lecture strangers on cattle paths, anyway? Obsolete and probably fictitious cattle paths, I may add.”

  Sydney opened his mouth to speak the truth but he couldn’t do it, couldn’t say that he owned this land without reckoning with what that meant. A shadow of grief lurked at the edges of his vision on even the brightest days here, and he found that he was too weary to fight it all the time; sometimes he had to pretend it wasn’t there, following him about. “I’m a land surveyor,” he said, and maybe that wasn’t such a bad lie, because it had been true once upon a time.

  From the hillock where Sydney stood, the countryside looked much the same as ever. The place seemed to have gotten on swimmingly even with an absentee landlord, or as swimmingly as it ever had, which was probably not saying much. He badly wanted to return to the railway, where he could turn his attention to the future and rid himself of the moldering past. There, he could keep his mind busy and free of old ghosts.

  He turned and faced the woman again. Oh, she was definitely scowling now. He sighed. Sydney didn’t actually enjoy making people cross with him, but it seemed to be something he achieved with effortless grace.

  “Excuse me,” he said in his best attempt at cordiality, which probably fell several degrees short of whatever this fine lady was accustomed to. Too bad for her. “I apologize for disturbing you.” That, he thought, was quite a magnanimous concession, considering that it was she who had interrupted him, not the other way around. “Good day.” He stepped past her, staying well clear of the dog, and made his way to the village.

  Chapter Two

  It had been nearly a week, and still there was no sign of Lex.

  After the fire, Sydney had written no fewer than half a dozen letters to Lex, all of which had been answered in an unfamiliar hand, none of which contained more than a bland sentence or two: his lordship sends his condolences, his lordship is recovering from his injuries, his lordship returned to London and has no plans to return to the North. Mortified that it had taken him six such letters to grasp that his correspondence was unwanted, Sydney had given up writing altogether. After all, they had only known one another for a year—a year during which they had become brothers-in-law, lovers, and then—Sydney had thought—friends. If Lex considered Sydney a reminder of the inferno and catastrophe with which that year had ended, Sydney could hardly blame him.

  So when two weeks ago, Sydney had received a letter from Lex’s secretary, indicating that the Duke of Hereford required Sydney’s presence at Pelham Hall, post haste, Sydney had been puzzled. He had thought it odd that Lex would summon him to what was, technically at least, Sydney’s own house, and a ruin to boot. But Lex had always been peculiar and imperious, and had likely grown even more so since inheriting the title, so Sydney hadn’t dwelt on it overmuch. When he arrived at Pelham Hall and found it empty, he thought Lex had perhaps been delayed, but nearly a week had passed and there was still no sign of his old friend. He asked in the village and no message had been left for him. Had something dreadful happened to Lex? Had he simply forgotten that he had sent for Sydney? Sydney did not know which prospect bothered him more.

  He had a week before he had to get back to Manchester, so he took a room at the village’s tiny inn and spent his days roaming the countryside, which was troublingly unchanged from two years earlier. He remembered every path, every lane, every stream and boundary line which he and A
ndrew had surveyed and mapped with their own tools, walked with their own feet. He could almost conjure up the image of the first map they had drafted, see where Pelham Hall was written in Andrew’s bold scrawl, before they had known the toll that place and its inhabitants would take on their lives.

  A week, and then he would return to the city, to a world of building and creation and progress. The prospect of returning to a life of usefulness, of solving problems that most people didn’t even realize existed, made him wish he hadn’t paid Lex’s summons any mind. But he and Lex had been something like family once, and he owed the man this much. Then he could leave the charred ruins of this manor house, and with it he could bid a final and relieved farewell to a part of his life he wished had never happened.

  He avoided the scowling woman’s property line. He had no wish to trouble women with his presence, and the countryside held an almost infinite number of paths he could choose instead of the one that traced the property line between Pelham Hall and Crossbrook Cottage. He knew that if he followed the brook for about an hour, he’d come across a circle of standing stones, so he packed a flask of ale, bought a loaf of bread from the baker, and set off. It was still early, but the day was already hot, so by the time he reached the stones, he had stripped to his shirtsleeves and tucked his hat under his arm.

  The first thing he saw was the dog, asleep at her mistress’s feet. If it hadn’t been for the presence of the dog—unmistakable with those gangly legs and peculiar black-and-white markings, like a child’s clumsy sketch of a shepherd’s dog—he might have convinced himself that this was not the woman with the border dispute, but some other person. The woman herself was seated on the grass, her back resting against one of the standing stones. She had a book open in her lap, and bare feet stretched before her. Her ease contrasted so sharply with the straight spine and upturned nose of their previous encounter that he felt almost ashamed to see her so lax and unguarded. This was Susannah at her bath, but instead of seeing her in a state of undress, he had a sense of seeing her without armor.