Page 21 of Blame It on the Earl (The Duke's Estates 3)

“Of course you can. This is your home.” He went to a partly filled shelf and pulled the books from it. He found a vacant space on another and shoved the volumes into it.

“Don’t disarrange anything,” protested Sarah.

“I would be astonished to find that there is any order here. This shall be your shelf. I’ll have your books brought here.”

“Should we ask…”

“There will be no objection.” He didn’t actually intend to mention it. “Come.” He offered his arm. Sarah took it, tucking her fingers into the crook of his elbow.

“Poldene is shaped like a capital H,” Kenver went on as he led her out into the corridor. “With the middle a bit stretched out, facing southwest toward the sea. The public reception rooms are in that central section with our bedchambers above them. The south wing holds the kitchens and estate offices and servants quarters in the back half and a dining room and ballroom in the front. It is actually the newest part of the house. My grandmother fancied the idea of grand balls. Our…future rooms in the north wing are part of the older guest accommodations. That wing also has a series of parlors on the lower floor, the gallery and the nursery above.”

Kenver opened a door at the end of the hall. When they stepped through into a long narrow room hung with portraits, Sarah got the sense of age and…not neglect, but the natural wear and tear of centuries.

“This is the gallery. We may as well begin with ancestors, eh?”

“Is the first earl here?” She was interested in the face of the man who’d claimed descent from Tristan and Iseult.

“He is, toward the middle.” Kenver led her down the chamber, the parquet floor creaking under their feet, and stopped at the far end. “Our history begins with this fellow,” he added.

Sarah looked up at an undistinguished painting of a man in medieval garb hung in the center of the narrow wall. It was not very well executed. The colors were muddy.

“This is Rafe Pendrennon,” said Kenver. “An enterprising Cornishman. He was knighted by King Henry I in 1131 because he married Adeliza, er…”

“Was she one of King Henry’s illegitimate children? He had a great many, I believe.”

“That is the rumor.” He smiled down at her. “Should you know such things?”

“I read,” replied Sarah. “And people tend not to ask what one is learning from thick historical tomes. They think such books must be boring, you see. And they are afraid you will tell them. At length.”

His smile widened. “Ah. Perhaps these are people who have suffered boredom at some point? When they did ask?”

Sarah smiled impishly back. “Possibly.”

“Have you ever been called devious, my lady?”

“Only by my good friends.” A familiar pang struck Sarah. Ada and Charlotte and Harriet had been constant companions all through school and into her London season. She missed them acutely now when a friend would have been so welcome.

“Ha.”

She’d amused him. Sarah enjoyed that. Poldene felt lighter, possible, when it was just the two of them. “So Rafe Pendrennon and his half-royal wife held onto their position in the fighting that followed King Henry’s death?”

“They did, oh mistress of all things historical. They seem to have kept their heads down and stayed out of the dynastic disputes. That became rather a tradition in our family. ‘Avoid politics and add acres whenever you can’ might be our motto.”

And now they would have her father’s land to add. Years and years from now. “Instead of what?” Sarah asked.

“Oh, we have no actual motto. That might attract attention.”

Sarah laughed. “There is no portrait of Adeliza?”

“No. We have very little information about her.”

“Because she wasn’t important for herself,” observed Sarah. “But only for her grand connections.”

“I…suppose,” he replied, looking uncomfortable.

They moved down the room, Kenver naming his ancestors running up to the present time. “There is the first earl,” he said at one point.

Sarah examined a man in Elizabethan dress, his hand on the hilt of a sword hanging at his side. He had a gleam in his eyes and a small neat beard. “He looks a bit like Sir Walter Raleigh,” she noted.

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