A Most Unconventional Courtship

‘Your clothes, your style, the way you move. You have money, you have been educated in these things. You have been bred to it in a way that simply shouts English aristocrat.’

‘Shouts?’ He was affronted, then amused, despite himself, at his own reaction.

‘I should have said whispers. Shouting would, of course, be ungentlemanly and vulgar. So unEnglish,’ she corrected herself with spurious meekness ‘Am I right?’

‘I am the Earl of Blakeney.’

‘Well, my lord, I suggest you eat your breakfast and then rest. Demetri will ask Mr Harrison to send a carrying chair for you this afternoon.’

‘I can leave on my own two feet just as soon as I have eaten and got dressed, I thank you.’

‘You can try to see if you can stand, let alone walk, of course,’ Alessa conceded with infuriating politeness. ‘And if you can, you can hobble through the streets in satin knee breeches, a sergeant at arm’s third-best shirt and no stockings and neckcloth. But I imagine Sir Thomas will have something to say about the impression of their English masters that would create with the local populace.’ She picked up the washing bowl and tidied the screen away. ‘I will be back when I have taken Dora to the nuns.’

There was a skirmish over a missing slate pencil, the whereabouts of Demetri’s jacket, the finding of Dora’s bag, and then the room was silent. The absence of all that vibrancy left an almost tangible gap.

Chance tossed back the blanket again, reached out to grip the back of the chair, and tried to get up. The effort brought the sweat out on his brow and a stream of highly coloured language from his lips. He hauled himself to his feet and found he could hop, very painfully. But that little witch was quite right; he could not get back to the Residency, nor to the Old Fort, under his own power.

He could see his evening suit neatly arrayed on a chair, the shoes tucked underneath. Sweating and swearing, he hopped across the room in search of his stockings, using the sparse pieces of furniture as crutches. She was right about that as well—he might get away with this worn old shirt, but he would be a laughing stock with bare legs under satin knee breeches.

Wooden pails were ranked against the wall, each full of water and white cloth. He fished in one, hoping to find his stockings; he could dry them at the fire. The garment he came up with was unidentifiable, but certainly not his. He hastily dropped the confection of fine lawn and thread-lace back into the water and fished in the next pail, coming up with a delightful chemise. It reminded him forcibly of a garment he had seen on his last mistress the night he had said goodbye to her.

Now there was a proper woman, he thought wistfully. Feminine, attentive, sweetly yielding to his every desire, and flatteringly regretful to be paid off before he set out on his Mediterranean journey. Why, then, he brooded as he straightened up painfully and scanned the rest of the room with narrowed eyes, why did this one arouse him far more than the very explicit memory of Jenny did?

The drip of cold water on his bare foot reminded him that he was standing, as near naked as made no difference, clutching intimate feminine apparel, in the middle of some Corfiot tenement and at the mercy of an icy and mysterious widow who might be back at any moment. Chance dropped the chemise into the pail and groped his way back to his bed. It chafed to admit it, but she was probably correct—he should rest if he wanted to escape from this nightmare.

Alessa climbed the stairs, noting gratefully that Kate had already been and scrubbed the bloodstains off the whitened wood. They took it in turns to look after the communal areas, long resigned to the feckless family on the ground floor ignoring their own obligations.

There were the muffled sounds of an altercation from behind the ground floor door. Sandro was no doubt being taken to task for lying abed instead of taking his boat out. Amid the hard-working fishermen he was a notable exception. There was silence from Kate’s rooms: she would doubtless be out marketing.

Alessa counted the chimes from the church bell as she climbed. Nine o’clock. So, his lordship had not put her behind so very much. Two hours to deal with the laundry and set it to dry, then there would be her usual visitors before the town settled down to its afternoon somnolence. His lordship would probably have to contain himself in patience until three o’clock when the Residency would send servants to collect him. It often took the visiting English a while to accustom themselves to the sensible Mediterranean practise of a rest in the heat of the day, although Sir Thomas, with his experience on Malta, and in the even greater heat of Ceylon, accepted it without question.

Alessa stopped outside her own door, conscious of her heart beating faster than the climb should account for. What was she apprehensive about? He was only a man, when all was said and done. However careless he had been the night before, he had behaved with remarkable forbearance on waking up to find himself in a strange place, in considerable pain and confronted by a hostile woman and two children.

She had overreacted, she admitted to herself painfully, and she supposed she had better apologise. She laid her hand on the catch and reviewed her excuses. He had brought violence and two unsavoury characters to her front door, she had been very tired, he was an outstandingly attractive man. Yes, well, Alessa my girl, that is not something you are going to explain to him, even if you could explain to yourself why that should discompose you so much. She took a deep breath and pushed open the door.

Chapter Three

Lord Blakeney was sitting up, only now the pillows were at the other end of the couch from the way she had left him. Now he faced the body of the room. ‘Have you been out of bed?’ Alessa asked sharply, good intentions forgotten, her eyes skimming round the room to see what else he had been up to.

‘Of course,’ he drawled, watching her face. ‘I read your diary, I found your money hidden behind the loose brick in the hearth and I left dirty fingerprints all over the pretty bits of nonsense in the soaking pails.’

Ignoring the first part of his sarcastic retort—she kept no diary and her savings were woven into strings of garlic hanging from the ceiling beams—Alessa latched on to the final remark. ‘And what were you doing with the laundry?’ she demanded.

‘Looking for my stockings.’

‘You can have them when they are clean and not before,’ she said briskly, in much the same tone as she would use to Demetri when he tried to wheedle something from her. ‘And how did you get as far as that across the room?’

‘I hopped.’

It must have hurt. Alessa felt a grudging flicker of admiration at his single-mindedness. ‘Is there anything you need?’ She set down her marketing basket and remembered she should be making her peace with him, not lecturing. ‘I am sorry if I was…short this morning, my lord. I was angry that you had led such men to my doorstep.’

‘I am sorry too. You were quite correct to scold me for it. I should have known better, as you said. My only excuse is tiredness, the pleasure of being on land again after several days at sea and, ridiculous as it probably seems, the warmth of the evening.’

‘Warmth, my lord?’ Alessa untied her flat straw hat and hung it behind the door before reaching for her apron.

‘I wish you would call me Chance.’ Dark brown eyes watched her, a smile lurking behind apparent seriousness.

You, my lord, are a charmer and you know it. I should refuse. ‘Very well, Chance.’ She reached behind her to tie the apron strings and saw his glance flick to her breasts as the movement strained them against her embroidered lawn shirt. The glance was momentary and not accompanied by the knowing leer that she had come to expect from so many of the Englishmen who had passed through the town in the wake of the French retreat. She poured a little of the heavily resinated red wine from the north of the island into two beakers, watered both generously, then passed him one. ‘You were explaining how the warm evening made you careless?’

He took the beaker with a murmur of thanks and sipped. To her secret amusement his eyebrows shot up as he tasted it, but he made no comment. His second sip was far more circumspect. ‘I was behaving like a tourist,’he admitted. ‘A picturesque scene, friendly, smiling faces, intriguing little streets, a balmy evening made for strolling, the stars like diamonds on black velvet. Who could have expected danger?’

Alessa raised a quizzical eyebrow and was rewarded by a self-mocking grin.

‘Any idiot, of course, as you are obviously too polite to remind me. If it had been Marseilles or Naples, I would have been on my guard. As it was, I took a risk and paid for it, but not as much as I deserved, thanks to you.’

Alessa hefted the cauldron on to the fire and poured in water. Then she began to lift the individual items from the soaking pails, checking each for marks that would require further treatment. ‘Is your nickname because you take risks? Or gamble, perhaps?’

‘Chance?’ He smiled. ‘No, just a convenient shortening from when I was a child. I am really quite painfully respectable and sensible.’

Alessa felt her eyebrows rising again and hastily straightened her face. He was too good to be true: handsome, nice to children and respectable to boot.

‘I can see you do not believe me.’

‘If that is so, you most certainly do not fit into the mould of most of the English gentlemen of my experience.’ Alessa reached down a bottle of liquefied soap and measured some out into the cauldron. He was very easy to talk to. ‘No gambling?’

‘Well, merely to be sociable.’ That sounded almost convincing.

‘No carousing late into the night?’

‘I do not carouse, merely enjoy fine wines and spirits in moderation.’ That was positively sanctimonious, if difficult to believe.

‘No ladies of the night, glamorous mistresses, orgies?’ Aha, that had produced a faint flush of colour on Chance’s admirably sculpted cheekbones.

‘Absolutely no orgies.’

Alessa shot him a slanting look, but did not comment. After all, one did not expect a man to be a saint—or one would be severely disappointed for most, if not all, of the time, in her opinion. A gentleman who did not squander all his money at play, drink himself into a stupor and pursue the female servants with lecherous intent was, as Chance said, positively respectable.

Was he also very conventional? He was standing up surprisingly well to her frank interrogation. What would he make of her story, if she were rash enough to tell him? She took a paring knife and began to flake off slivers from a block of greenish-grey olive oil soap; the last bottle she had prepared was almost empty.

‘Is there nothing useful I can do? I cannot feel comfortable lying here while you are working so hard.’

Alessa shook her head, then realised that he might as well carry on with the soap so that she could be dealing with the more soiled items while the water heated. ‘Thank you. Perhaps you can do this.’ She perched on the edge of the couch and handed Chance a bowl, the knife and the soap. ‘I need fine slivers so it will dissolve well in water, then I bottle it up concentrated and use it with the washing. It is better with the fine fabrics than scrubbing the soap directly into them.’ She realised she was explaining, as though to the children. ‘I am sorry, you could not possibly want to know all that. I get into the habit of teaching.’

He took the knife and began to whittle at the block. ‘Like this?’

‘Perfect.’ She smiled stiffly at him, suddenly self-conscious at their close proximity. She could feel the firm length of his thigh against her hip and made rather a business of standing up and twitching the cover straight. It did not help that she knew precisely what lay under that blanket.

He was so approachable that it was almost like chatting with Fred Court, or Spiro the baker, and she had fallen into the Greek habit of openly expressed curiosity about strangers. Her neighbours would think nothing of a close interrogation about family, occupation, views, interests and wealth, but she must not allow herself to fall into the trap of undue familiarity with someone from the Lord High Commissioner’s circles.