"Aye, sir. Through the village, and take the right fork. Follow the footpath 'cross the fields, and it'll bring you onto Belmont land be'ind the manor."
Lord Stoneridge nodded and turned his horse. He'd never seen his ancestral home, except in paintings, and for a reason he couldn't identify wanted to familiarize himself with the house, its grounds, and its dependencies before he announced himself.
He followed directions and found himself approaching the house from the rear. He broke through a spinney, and the long, low Tudor manor house faced him on a hill, across a swift-running stream, spanned by a narrow stone bridge.
Stoneridge Manor. His home… and it would be the home of his children. Gilbraith children. A surge of grim satisfaction rose in his breast. In two hundred years a Gilbraith had not set foot in Stoneridge. Now it would be theirs. The Belmonts' unfortunate tendency to produce female progeny had finally excluded them.
Except…
With a muttered oath he turned his horse to ride along the stream. The house and its immediate park were nothing. The wealth lay in the estate – its woods and fields and tenant farmers. Without access to those revenues, the house itself was merely a gentleman's residence, and devilishly expensive to maintain. In fact, he couldn't possibly maintain it with the mere competency he'd inherited from his own father.
But what the hell did four chits and their mother know about running an estate, about managing the affairs of tenants? They might imagine they could rely on a bailiff, but they'd be robbed blind. The land would run itself into the ground in a few years.
The fourth Earl of Stoneridge had been demented… whatever that idiot lawyer had said.
He slashed at a gorse bush with a vicious stroke of his riding crop, and his horse whinnied, throwing up its head in alarm.
"Easy." Sylvester patted the animal's neck as they moved through a stand of oak trees. As he emerged into the sunlight again, he saw a prone figure some way along the bank of the stream. There was something about the intent stillness of the figure that intrigued him.
He dismounted, tethering the horse to a sapling, and approached, his footsteps soft and muffled in the damp mossy ground.
He spotted the girl's sandals a few yards from where she lay on her stomach, her bare feet in the air, the hem of her unbleached linen dress lying against her thighs, revealing slim brown calves. Two thick black plaits lay along her back. Her sleeves were rolled up and both hands were in the brown water of the stream.
A gypsy tickling trout was Sylvester's immediate conclusion.
"We thrash poachers where I come from," he observed to her back. The girl's position didn't change, and he realized that his approach hadn't startled her. She must have heard his footsteps, soft as they were.
"Oh, we 'angs 'em in these parts," she said in a soft Dorsetshire drawl, still without looking around. "Less'n we're feelin' kind. Then we transports 'em to the colonies."
He couldn't help smiling at this cool riposte. Clearly this gypsy wasn't easily intimidated. He stood silently, affected by her intense concentration as she engaged in a battle of wits with the fish lying inert in the shadow of a camouflaging flat brown stone. Sunlight danced on the smooth surface of the water, and her hands were utterly still while her prey became accustomed to them. Then she moved. Her hands shot up from the water, flourishing a speckled brown trout.
"Gotcha, master trout!" She chuckled, holding the thrashing fish in the air for a second before tossing him back into the stream. The fish leaped out of the water, an agile flashing curve, sunlit drops of water along its back, and then it was gone, leaving a widening circle of bubbles on the surface.
"Why on earth did you throw it back? It looked big enough for a substantial dinner," Stoneridge asked in surprise.
"I'm not 'ungry," she said in the same cool tone as before. Rolling over, she sat up, squinting at him against the sun. "We shoots trespassers in these parts, too. An' you're on Belmont land… boundary's just beyond those trees." She gestured with an outflung arm.
"If I am trespassing, I'll lay odds I'm in good company," he said, his eyes narrowing as he examined her face. A gamine face, brown as a berry, with a pointed chin and small, straight nose. A fringe of black hair wisped on a broad forehead over a pair of large pansy-blue eyes. Quite an appealing little gypsy.
She merely shrugged and scrambled to her feet, shaking down the folds of her coarse linen smock, tossing the heavy black plaits over her shoulders. "Not your business what I do. You're not from these parts, are you?"
She was standing with her bare feet slightly apart, her hands resting on her hips, and there was a distinct challenge to her stance and the tilt of her head. He wondered if it was unconscious – her habitual way of viewing the world. It amused him. And she really was quite an appealing gypsy.
He stepped toward her, smiling, reaching out a hand to catch her chin. "No, I'm not, but I've a mind to become better acquainted with them… or rather with their Romanys." His hand tightened and he brought his mouth to hers.
The Earl of Stoneridge never fully understood what happened next. One minute he was standing upright, his lips pressed to hers, the sun-warmed scent of her skin in his nostrils, the firm line of her jaw in his palm, and the next he was lying on his back in the stream. Someone had instructed the gypsy poacher in the martial arts.
"Rat… cur…," she yelled at him as she stood on the edge of the bank, dancing on her toes, her eyes almost black with outrage. "That'll teach you, you filthy toad… tryin' to take advantage of an honest girl. You come near me again and I'll cut your -"
The rest of the tirade was lost in an indignant screech as he lunged off the bed of the stream, braceleting her bare ankles with finger and thumb. A violent jerk and she thumped onto her backside onto the hard ground. She yelled, grabbing at tufts of mossy grass, trying to save herself as he yanked her off the bank until she was sitting, hissing and spitting, in the thick mud of the shallows.
Sylvester stood up, glaring down at the livid girl. "Sauce for the goose, my girl," he declared. "Whoever taught you to wrestle omitted to teach you not to crow too soon." He dusted off his hands in a gesture that he realized was futile and squelched out of the stream, clambering onto the bank.
The girl picked herself up out of the mud. "Don't you call me 'your girl'!" she yelled, gouging a lump of mud from the bank and hurling it at his retreating back. It caught him full between his shoulders, and he swung round with a bellow of anger.
She had scrambled onto the bank, and there was murder in her eyes. He looked at the sodden, mud-smothered figure all set to do battle in whatever fashion presented itself, and suddenly he burst out laughing as the absurdity of the situation hit him.
He was soaked to the skin, his boots full of water and probably ruined beyond repair, all because that bedraggled bantam took exception to a kiss. How was he to have guessed that a gypsy girl would react with all the outrage of a vestal virgin?
He threw up his hands in a gesture of appeasement. "Let's declare honors even, shall we?"
"Honor?" she spat at him. "What do you know of honor?"
The laughter died in his eyes and his body became rigid, his hands dropping to his sides, curling into fists.
You stand accused of dishonoring the regiment. How do you answer, Major Gilbraith?
He stood again in the crowded courtroom at Horseguards, heard again the dreadful hush from the benches of his fellow officers of His Majesty's Third Dragoons, felt again the gimlet eyes of General, Lord Feringham, presiding over the court-martial. How had he answered? Not guilty, my lord. Yes, of course: Not guilty, my lord. But was he? If only he could remember those moments before the bayonet struck. If only Gerard had testified to what Sylvester believed had happened: He'd been holding an impossible position at Vimiera; Gerard was to come up in support; but before he could do so, they'd been overwhelmed and suffered the greatest military disgrace to befall a regiment – they'd lost the colors. Gerard, his boyhood friend, said he'd been on his way in support. He hadn't been aware of a renewed French attack on the isolated outpost… but whatever had happened, they'd arrived too late. Major Gilbraith had been taken prisoner, his men left for dead, the colors captured.