Promise of a Family

The children began to giggle as he splashed through the water, keeping himself between the boat and the rocks. He grimaced when the waves lifted the boat and struck him so hard that he stumbled against stone. He fought to regain his footing. The sand slipped away beneath his boots.

He snarled wordless frustration under his breath. His new boots! Why hadn’t he paused the short second it would have taken to yank them off?

His self-recrimination was interrupted by a sharp cry. An older boy sobbed loudly as a blond boy pinched his arm again.

“Stop that!” Drake snapped.

That set the blond boy to crying, too.

Benton waded through the waves and seized the other side of the jolly boat. “What is wrong with them?”

The younger boy began weeping, as well.

Drake motioned for his first mate to help him steer the small boat to shore. With two of them to balance the boat that wanted to skip and dance on each wave, they made short work of climbing out of the water and dragging the boat onto the sand.

All the children, including the baby, were howling now. Drake fired orders to his crew. Food and something to drink for the older children. The baby must be fed, too. Telling Benton to see to the children’s needs, he turned on his heel.

“Captain?” called his first mate.

“What?” He did not keep his barely restrained rage out of his voice.

“Where are you going?”

Fury whipped through his words. “To find the rotters who put these children in a boat and left them to die.”

“But how will you know who did this?”

“There is always one person in any village who can be counted on to know everyone in that village. He would know who is capable of putting these children in a boat and setting them adrift. In addition, he will be willing to help.”

“Who is that?”

“The parson.” He scowled as water squeezed between his toes in his ruined boots. “And when, with his help, I find those curs who were so cruel, I will make sure they are sorry they ever set eyes on these children. I promise you that.” He strode toward the village.

* * *

Closing the book, Susanna Trelawney leaned back in her chair. The household accounts had balanced. At last. She needed to speak to both Mrs. Hitchens, the housekeeper, and Baricoat, the butler, about checking their reports more closely, because she had found too many mistakes. She was thankful for Mrs. Ford. As always, the cook’s records were exact to the last ha’penny.

Just as Susanna liked. With a sense of order in the great house, chaos could be kept at bay. Her family could go about their lives without having to worry about something unanticipated upsetting them.

As it had that horrific week when grief had held the house and her family in its serrated claws, shredding their hearts. Her own heart had not had a chance to heal from being broken by the one man she had ever loved. Franklin Chenowith had run off to marry another woman on the very day that the banns were first read for Susanna’s wedding to him. Susanna had considered that woman, Norah Yelland, her bosom bow. She had surrendered her sense of control when she fell in love, and she had paid the cost, losing both of her best friends in one instant.

The cost had been too high, and instead of vowing to love Franklin till death did them part, she had tried to forgive them. She had struggled with it, and she promised herself that she would never allow herself to be so foolish again. She would remain in control of her emotions and her life.

No matter what.

No! It did no one any good to dwell on the past. Instead, she should work to keep everything in proper order so serenity could reign in the house.

Susanna patted the accounts book and sighed. She loved working in this quiet room with its burgundy walls and coffered ceiling, even though the hearth was too narrow to heat the room much above freezing on the coldest winter days. She gazed out the window toward the moor. The undulating ground offered perfect grazing for both cattle and sheep. Like most of the windows in the great house Cothaire, it offered no view of the sea. A beautiful vista would be lovely, but cold winds blasted the seaside of the house, pitting any window glass and chilling rooms. Any room in Cothaire that faced the sea had thick exterior shutters that could be closed and locked from the outside in advance of a strong storm.

The sea was an integral part of their lives. Many of the villagers provided for their families by fishing and trading upon its waters. Her sister Caroline’s husband had been one of them until he was killed far out at sea less than a week after Mama’s sudden death. It had been a terrible time, and if she could have spared her sister—or her two brothers and her father—a moment of that sorrow, she gladly would have.

“Lady Susanna?” came a familiar voice from the doorway.

“What is it, Venton?”

The footman, wearing the family’s simple gray livery, dipped his head in her direction. She and Venton had grown up together at Cothaire because his mother had been the nursery maid when Susanna was the last one living within the two-story nursery. Knowing Susanna was lonesome because she was more than a decade younger than her brother Raymond, Mrs. Venton had brought her son to the nursery with her until Susanna was almost six.

Since then, their lives had gone on separate but parallel paths. Venton had worked hard to rise to the rank of footman, and Susanna had learned to handle a household and be a proper wife to the man chosen for her by her father, the Earl of Launceston. Then her future had changed when her mother died five years ago and Susanna took over the management of her father’s house while her older brother Arthur, who was the heir, assisted in running the estate.

“Lady Susanna, his lordship requests your presence,” Venton answered, and she again pushed aside uncomfortable thoughts about the past. Lingering on them was silly.

“Of course. Where is he?”

“The smoking room.”

Her brows shot skyward before she could compose herself. As she stood, she affixed a calm expression on her face, though curiosity roiled inside her. The smoking room was the domain of her father, her brothers and their male guests. She could not remember the last time she—or any other female—had been invited into it.

What a surprise! And she had hated surprises ever since she got such a public one when Franklin failed to appear for the first reading of their wedding banns.

As if she had given voice to her astonishment, Venton said quietly, “His lordship has been reading there all afternoon, and he had planned to take his tea there.”

“Thank you, Venton,” she replied as she walked past him. She understood what he had not said. Papa’s gout must be plaguing him again. The painful condition was the primary reason that he had turned over so many of the duties of Cothaire to her and her brother Arthur as well as her sister, Caroline, the oldest sibling, who acted as Papa’s hostess.

The smoking room lay beyond the main dining room. Like the drawing room, where the ladies could withdraw from the table, the smoking room allowed the men to converse more easily and blow a cloud of tobacco smoke if they pleased.

That strong odor greeted Susanna when she knocked on the door and her father called for her to enter. Chairs were arranged for the ease of conversation in front of a huge hearth. On every wall hung either swords and pistols or pictures of foxhounds and horses. Some of the portraits of horses were life-size and dominated the room.

“Ah, my dear,” said her father with a wide smile. “Do come in.”

Harold Trelawney, the Earl of Launceston, still had the tautly sculptured face that he had passed on to his sons. His hair, once as ebony as his children’s, was laced with silver that matched the color of his eyes. Only Susanna had inherited his silver-gray eyes; her siblings’ eyes were crystal blue like their late mother’s.

Papa did not rise. She did not expect him to when he suffered from another acute episode of gout.

However, another man stood from a chair that had its back to the door. Her eyes followed, astonished by the height of the dark-haired stranger. Strong muscles moved lithely beneath his navy blue coat, and her heartbeat faltered, then raced like a runaway horse. As he turned to face her, she found herself captured by the brownest eyes she had ever seen, and breathing suddenly seemed a chore. A deep tan told her that he was a man accustomed to working outside.

As his gaze swept over her, she forced herself to breathe normally so he would not guess the unsettling effect he had on her. She could not chide him because she had been staring at him boldly. She lowered her eyes demurely and continued to appraise him from beneath her lashes.

The lines at the corners of his eyes suggested that he smiled often and easily. Perhaps so, but he was not smiling now. His mouth was drawn into a straight line, and his ebony brows lowered in a scowl. By his sides, his hands opened and closed with what looked like impatience. Was he in a hurry to be done with whatever business had brought him to Cothaire? Or was some emotion stronger than restlessness gripping him?

Into the silence that had settled on the room, Papa said, “This is my youngest, Lady Susanna. My dear, may I introduce you to Drake Nesbitt?”

“How do you do, Mr. Nesbitt?” She noticed the line of dried salt on the knees of his pale brown breeches and sodden black boots. Had he been wading in the harbor without taking off his boots?

“Captain Nesbitt,” he corrected so coolly that the temperature in the room seemed to drop a dozen degrees.

Captain Drake Nesbitt? That explained, at least, why his clothing was stained with salt. But why was he here? Ships often sailed into Porthlowen Harbor without their captains coming to Cothaire.

Fighting to keep her voice even, she asked, “Papa, what do you wish of me?”