Chapter Eleven
My ny won pyw e cammen. (Cornish saying)
I know not who he is at all.
Jack rapped his forehead against the stone mullion of the window.
Why did he keep baring the rogue? It was clearer than the Cornish sky that Miss Penrose hated the fellow, but that was who he was.
Indeed, rule number sixteen stated leopards had spots for a reason.
“My lord?”
“Go to bed, Oliver,” he urged, staring out into the pitch black. “I can manage a shirt and breeches.”
“Hmm, but if I might suggest… Rule number thirty, my lord.” And the door softly closed.
Faugh, so said the virtuous valet but tomorrow he had to compete with that whiskered warriorHughfor Miss Penrose’s attention and she appeared to prefer the captain’s ill-fitting boots.
Not that Jack was jealous; it simply made the mission trickier.
A light caught his eye from the trimmed but parched lawns. It flickered and swayed, casting the central bed of shrubbery to dancing ogres.
Squashing his nose to the leaded window, he squinted, images distorting through the centuries-old glass, but he could just make out…Benjamin Roskilly.
What on earth was he doing at this hour, scampering around with lantern and odd-shaped sack?
Only one thing for it and besides, sleep would not be forthcoming on such a close evening. Perhaps the young cub was preparing some odd Cornish druidic incantation or somesuch.
But just in case, he stuffed a stiletto knife in his boot.
Jack had attempted to memorise the outlay of this ancient house one morning but nevertheless, without candle, he clanked into some ancestor’s suit of armour in the hall, causing a grunt from the professor’s bedchamber. The stairs also groaned alarmingly, and it would only require some fair damsel to wander the winding halls with fair head tucked beneath fair arm to complete the Gothic ambiance.
No such luck, and he exited through the old hunting door without further mishap and into the faint light of a waning moon.
With eyes flitting for the marauding peacock, he crossed the lawned garden in haste, and promptly tripped over a protuberance on the ground.
“Ouch!”
“Benjamin?” he whispered, wondering why it was obligatory to whisper at night. “What are you doing? Awaiting pesky piskies?”
“Guarding Miss Penrose.”
“Guar…” Jack gazed into the dark and assuredly, also sitting on the ground at some distance from the shrubbery was the lady of the house, not retired abed at all, but with a candlestick by her side, and some kind of white sheet tacked onto a frame. “Whatisshe doing?”
“You can take over,” the lad said, standing only too keenly and stretching his gangly limbs. “’Tes like watching someone ladle out Dozmary Pool with a limpet shell, and this looby weather turns me roving.”
Looby…? Never mind. “You trust me?”
“Old Mrs Mawkin said that despite your fligs and dollymoppin’, you’re no timmersome timdoodle. Night t’ee.”
No idea.
A nod and the young sprig loped off.
Whatever she was doing, Miss Penrose was engrossed, gazing at something on the bedsheet with a magnifying glass.
With cautious tread, he approached. “Are you well?” he whispered, causing her to drop the glass.
