Page 45 of How to Tempt An Earl
She was just making trouble, letting her imagination run away with her because part of her refused to accept that things had worked out and that everything would be fine. She wasn’t used to things working out. Her father had only had a cough. He was supposed to have got well. He hadn’t. Still, there seemed a little chance that the man she’d found on the beach was in any way connected to the incident in Wapping.
Peter raised his hand when he saw her coming and reached for his shirt, motioning for her brothers to do the same. Such a gentleman, Peter was. She’d noted his manners immediately. Even lying abed recovering, he’d been full of ‘please’s and ‘thank you’s for her efforts.
‘Let me take that.’ He reached for her basket, lifting it from her arm with a smile.
‘You’re not overdoing it, are you?’ she asked, looking him over. He glowed with ruddy health these days. It was hard to reconcile the man who’d walked beside her with the one Andrew and Philip had carried back to the house in a stretcher made of an old quilt.
‘Not at all. We should have the wheat in by tomorrow.’ At the little cottage, he held the door open for her and allowed her to precede him inside. Anne was in the kitchen, making preparations for supper. He set the basket on the table and peeked beneath its cover. ‘Did you get a good price for your eggs?’
‘Yes, enough to pay the miller to grind the wheat.’ Which meant they could sell flour, and that meant income. She didn’t dare hope it would go far enough but it would be a start.
‘I’m glad.’ He smiled and she felt herself melt with its warmth. She’d never seen a smile like his. Nor eyes like his—the colour of chocolate. ‘The boys can finish up on their own. We were nearly done. Let me wash up first and then perhaps we can take a walk. I want to talk with you about something.’
That sounded ominous. Did he want to discuss leaving? Had he remembered something?
Please, Lord, don’t take him from me yet, she prayed.I still need him.
Whenwouldbe a good time?her conscience mocked.
After the harvest there would be winter preparations to make, the roof to see to. Winter would make the roads and sea hard to travel on. Perhaps she could convince him to stay until spring? But then there’d be the planting to do, and the cultivating all summer. By the time he had washed himself, her stomach was in knots.
You’re being ridiculous, she scolded herself.He has to leave at some point.
Peter offered his arm to her and they headed down the lane towards the beach, not that they’d walk that far.
‘I was thinking, the day after tomorrow, the boys and I would go over to the Pratts’ and help bring their crop in. Daniel Pratt doesn’t have any sons to help.’ The Pratts were her neighbours two miles away on the other side from Francis Hartlett. ‘But only if you can spare us. If there’s nothing else that needs doing here?’
‘No, not at all.’ Relief flooded her. He wasn’t going to leave. ‘It’s kind of you to think of them.’ She smiled up at him and he smiled back, another melting smile that had her insides warming, her mind coming to life with a hundred dangerous fantasies.
What would it be like to be married to a man like him who was kind and considerate? Someone who consulted her; who enquired about her day and the things that were important to her, such as the eggs and mill money? That was not the sort of man Francis Hartlett was. But they were fantasies only. She could not marry a man with nothing, not even his own name. Someday his memories would return and then what? What if he remembered he had a wife and family somewhere else?
‘How was the market other than good egg prices?’ he asked. ‘Any news of interest?’
Ellen worried her lip. Ought she tell him about the news story? What if it triggered his memories? He would leave then. What if she didn’t and he heard the story first from someone else? He would know she’d withheld information from him. He would not respect that.
But, Lord, I need him, came her selfish prayer.I don’t want to marry Francis Hartlett. I don’t want to lose my father’s farm and be taken into someone else’s home like a poor relation, to have my family split up. They’re all I have left.
What had she done in her life to deserve such suffering?
‘What is it, Ellen? Is there bad news?’ Her hesitation had alerted him and he was all concern, those soft brown eyes fixed on her. She could not lie, and omissions were a type of lie.
‘There was a newspaper in town, quite an old one—you know we don’t get a timely paper here. There was a story in it. It’s probably nothing, I don’t want to get your hopes up.’ Or to set hers down, but she was nothing if not honest.
* * *
Peter felt her hand tighten on his arm and he knew—she thought the story had something to do with him. She was frightened to tell him, his brave Ellen who’d taken in a half-dead stranger from the sea because her conscience had demanded it, even when her pocketbook couldn’t afford it. His eyes had missed nothing in the days of his recovery, when he’d been able to do nothing more than lie in bed and watch life in the cottage. He wasn’t supposed to notice that she’d given up her bed for him in exchange for a pallet beside the fire so that he might rest, or that she’d often slipped her portion of supper to him so that he might have a faster recovery. But he had noticed.
‘Whatever it is, Ellen, it doesn’t mean I’ll leave,’ he promised. He owed her. She’d invested resources in saving his life, resources she could not easily spare. He knew enough from the boys’ chatter in the field that she was being pressed to marry, an arrangement that was unsatisfactory to all of them…and to him. He wasn’t staying simply to satisfy a return on her investment. He wanted to stay. He liked life in the little farmhouse: the simple, hearty meals at the wood plank table; the warmth of the worn handmade quilts at night; the close company of the four siblings. Had his old life contained such elements? Was that why he found comfort in them—because somewhere in his mind he’d known this life?
‘There was an incident in Wapping. A man died. His body was found, dragged out of the river. But the other man was not found.’
Peter furrowed his brow. ‘Do you think there’s a chance I am the missing man? That seems…far-fetched. We’re a long way from Wapping.’
‘The dead man had a knife wound,’ Ellen added quietly. ‘His proved fatal, just as yours so easily could have. He was pulled from the water as you were, just different water. He was found but you were lost.’
He could see the picture she was piecing together in her head: there’d been a knife fight on a wharf in Wapping that had progressed to the water where he’d been successful in killing the other man. ‘You think I am a killer?’ he asked in quiet shock. Was he? Did thatfeelright?
‘No!’ she was quick to rejoin, regret flashing in her pretty blue eyes. From her horrified expression he could see that she’d not thought the scenario all the way through, to the conclusions and consequences of accepting the picture she was constructing.
