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His smile transformed his face from darkly brooding to almost human, but she was too angry to notice, too furious to take in his good looks, his thick dark hair curling below his riding hat and into his neck, his broad shoulders and the long elegant fingers holding the reins, not to mention a shapely thigh, clad in white riding breeches, with which he was controlling his restive mount. ‘Perhaps. But I do not think anyone would dare invade the Park.’
‘No, but why is there one law for the rich and another for the poor? And for your information, I am not the child’s mother and I do not live here. I am simply an observer.’
‘Oh.’ He looked slightly taken aback, but recovered quickly. ‘Then I suggest you reunite the child with his mother and mind your own business.’
‘I intend to make it my business,’ she said, as a woman came from the house, diverting him from a reply.
‘Thank you, thank you,’ she said, taking the child from Helen. ‘I was upstairs when I heard the hullabaloo and in my haste to come down and fetch Edward indoors to safety, I tripped and fell. It winded me for a moment. If you hadn’t acted so quickly …’ She stopped, suddenly seeing the Viscount. ‘My lord.’ She curtsied and dipped her head.
The gesture infuriated Helen. ‘He and his like have just frightened your little boy nearly to death and ruined your garden and you bend your knee to him. You should be angry and demanding compensation.’
‘I can’t do that,’ she murmured, looking fearfully up at the man on the horse. ‘This is a tied cottage and I work at the big house.’
Helen realised she would probably make matters worse if she went on, so she held her tongue. Looking from the woman to the Viscount, she caught him gazing at her with an expression of puzzlement. So, he did not know who she was. He would soon find out.
He turned his attention from her to the mother. ‘Are you hurt, madam?’
‘A bruise or two, my lord. It is nothing, I thank you.’
Helen could have kicked her for her meekness. No wonder men like the Earl and his son felt they had a God-given right to trample over poor folk, just as they had trampled over the garden.
‘I am sorry about the garden,’ his lordship said softly, taking Helen by surprise. ‘The dogs became too excited to control and there was nothing I could do.’ He smiled again, though this time it was aimed at the other woman, not Helen. He reached into his waistcoat pocket and withdrew a coin, which he passed to her. She accepted it, thanked him and curtsied. Without looking at Helen again, he wheeled his horse about and rode off.
‘Of all the arrogance!’ Helen exclaimed, watching him go.
‘He has given me a whole guinea,’ the woman said in mitigation. ‘And, to be fair, he didn’t ride over the garden, did he? He was the only one who stopped.’
Helen was in no mood to see any good in the Earl of Warburton’s son and did not respond, but accepted an invitation to enter the cottage for a cup of tea. ‘It is only camomile,’ the woman said. ‘I do not have Indian tea.’
It was while she was waiting for the kettle to boil that she learned a little more about Mrs Watson. ‘My husband died at Waterloo,’ she told Helen, putting the baby on the floor while she set out a teapot and cups. ‘Eddie was only a baby when he went off. He’d been all through the Peninsula without a scratch and he didn’t have to re-enlist, but he would go because Viscount Cavenham went and he couldn’t have the Earl’s son going off and making him look a coward. Why are men so proud?’
‘I don’t know,’ Helen murmured, thinking of her father. He was proud, too, and look where that had got him.
‘I’m lucky the housekeeper at the big house gave me a job in the laundry,’ Mrs Watson went on. ‘While I have this cottage, I can manage. Having the garden helps with fruit and vegetables and eggs, though nothing was growing well this year. Do you think we will ever get a summer?’
‘Let us hope so,’ Helen said. ‘I fear for the workers if the harvest is ruined.’ The year so far had been uncommonly wet and cold. It had rained every day and there had been snow in London the week before. According to the London newspapers, which sometimes published news from the regions, there was snow in hilly districts only a little further north. Some crops were already rotting in the fields. Farm labourers were out of work and added to the numbers of soldiers returning from the end of the war with Napoleon. And yet the Earl must have his sport. Unlike some, he hunted all the year round.
‘I’ll have to see what I can salvage. Perhaps it’s not as bad as it looks.’ Mrs Watson broke in on Helen’s reverie. ‘I have you to thank that Eddie was not trampled along with it. He could have been killed. That would have been far, far worse.’
‘And I don’t suppose the Earl would care any more about that than he cared about your dead chickens.’
Mrs Watson handed her a cup of tea. ‘Is it just the Earl you dislike or is it all landed gentry?’
The question surprised Helen and for a moment she did not know how to answer. ‘The Earl of Warburton is typical of his kind,’ she said slowly. ‘Arrogant, selfish, unfeeling. They seem to think money will buy them anything. It would do them all good to be without it for a while to see how everyone else has to manage.’
Mrs Watson laughed. ‘My, you do have a chip on your shoulder, don’t you?’
‘I suppose I do,’ Helen admitted. ‘but I try not to let it show. Today I was so angry I couldn’t help it.’
‘You don’t live in the village, do you?’
‘No, in Warburton. My name is Helen Wayland.’
This evidently meant nothing to Mrs Watson so Helen did not enlighten her. In her experience, telling someone she owned and published the Warburton Record was a sure way to have them holding their tongues. They would not believe she did not intend to publish some calumny about them when all she wanted to do was publicise their plight.
‘You are a town dweller, Miss Wayland, and cannot know what it is like to live in a small village, dependent on the local landowner for everything …’
‘Perhaps you should tell me,’ Helen said, picking the baby up off the floor and cuddling him on her lap. He began playing with her father’s watch, which she wore as a fob. ‘Then I might understand.’
Mrs Watson looked doubtful, but her visitor was so obviously fond of children and genuinely interested that she poured them both a second cup of tea and sat down to answer her questions.
Miles considered whether to catch up with the hunt or call it a day and decided he might as well go home. He did not want to be party to any more ruined gardens and he certainly did not want to have to justify himself to irate young ladies with fierce hazel eyes. Who the devil was she? Not gentry, that was evident from the simple way she dressed and the way she did not mind that grubby child dirtying her clothes, but none of that detracted from her proud demeanour. She had defied him and that was something he was not used to and his first reaction had been anger. But what she had said had troubled his conscience, not that he could do anything to prevent his father running the hunt over his own land. He was a law unto himself and as far as he was concerned owning the land and the cottages meant he also owned those who dwelt in them.
Did the defiant Miss Grey Gown come under that heading? She had undoubtedly saved the child’s life and, in his opinion, its mother should not be the only one who was grateful because his father, as Master of the Hunt, should also give thanks that his dogs and horses had not trampled the little one to death. Had he even been aware of her or the child as he hurtled through the garden after the dogs?
And what on earth had the woman meant by saying ‘I intend to make it my business’? It sounded like a threat, but how could a mere nobody, who could not be more than five and twenty, threaten someone like the Earl of Warburton? Miles was suddenly and inexplicably afraid