Page 76 of The Baronet’s Bartered Bride

Thaker looked abashed, and Wenna grinned at him as she signed. “Didna want to part with the buzgut, did ye, me ansome? Dashel’s proper attached to me luv, ’ee is, and better fit ye let them go on together, I think.”

“And Thaker is proper attached to the hound in return,” Joseph guessed, conveying as much to the other man with his gestures. Thaker tousled the hound’s ears as the beast leaned against his leg, panting happily.

“Where’s Jock gone to?” Joseph asked as the lad approached, one of the new stable boys that Wenna had canvassed for his staff from a local family. “We need him to take Arthur and see if he can intercept that gent taking a stroll across my property. Warn him that someone was shooting here a day or so agone, without my permission, I might add.”

Wenna looked at him, and Thaker looked at him, and Joseph made the same connection: the fleeing man might very well be the trespasser, and had declined to shoot at them this time because there were four of them to his one, plus a dog.

“The jockey?” the stable boy piped up. “’Ee’s taken Miz Da Costa away south to see ’er people. Plymouth again, I think ’ee said.”

“Inez—Mrs. Da Costa has left? To Plymouth? She doesn’t have people there.”

Inez was gone. She had left him. Joseph felt the same thrill of terror jolt through his body as when the gunshot spooked the horse and Inez had fallen off the cart.

He had no life without her in it. She could not leave him. He must do whatever he could to keep her, worthy or not.

He wheeled and headed for the house. He needed to confirm the boy’s divulgence. He needed to see what she had taken, to know how long she planned to stay away.

“What’s a rider doing on my land anyway?” Joseph asked as the others turned to walk with him. “Hunting for leverets?” The baby hares were a delicacy, he would admit.

“Fossicking, most like,” Wenna mused. At Joseph’s puzzled look, she translated. “Prospecting, I think they say upcountry.”

Joseph slowed and signed to Thaker. “I haven’t looked on the other side of the stream. I thought it was just rocks.”

’Tis, Thaker signed back. But he might’ve left something.

Something that might identify the interloper. Joseph agreed. While he was desperate to know where Inez went, he had a responsibility to the people who lived on his property to ensure they would not be attacked while simply doing their job.

These acres on the southeast corner had been a delight to play in when he was a lad, the granite bones of the earth showing through. To his boyhood imagination the rocky outcroppings, with their colorful striations and clusters of embedded minerals, had served as the deserts of Arabia, the Mongolian steppes, and the high peaks of the Alps.

Now there was a great crater blasted into the ground, creating a cliff that young Joseph would have turned into the Scottish peak of Ben Nevis and undertaken to scale. It would have taken considerable force to break apart the granite shelves, and Joseph’s hunch was confirmed when he pressed a finger to a smudge of black dust and then sniffed. Gunpowder.

“What were they looking for?” he wondered aloud.

“Lodes of ore,” Wenna answered, signing for her husband. “Thas as how they make the pits deeper when all of the surface veins have been mined.”

“Veins of what?” Joseph picked up a nearby fragment, what looked like a packed piece of earth. The surface was mottled with gray and red-brown spots, like a vellum page in one of Amaranthe’s old manuscripts that had been left to mold and rot for a hundred years. It was a thin shard, but much heavier than parchment, and the sheared border held an edge that pressed against his palm.

He looked up, a suspicion solidifying, just as Thaker signed back. Copper, the other man said.

An unfamiliar horse was being walked in the front drive before the house when they returned, Joseph carrying a sack of the rock fragments with their veins of reddish-brown and green. Clouds hunched low in the sky, boding rain, and the low light reminded Joseph that Inez was gone. He must find where she went and follow her. Wenna’d had no notice she meant to depart, and if it were an errand for the house, she would have spoken to Wenna if not to him.

“Tell me,” he said to the stable boy, who started forward to talk to the lad holding the other horse, “does that look to you like one of the horses they keep at the White Hart in town?”

“It do, sir.”

“And bearing a remarkable resemblance to the mount Dashel flushed. The trespasser’s.”

“It might, at that, sir,” said the boy.

Joseph was only partly inclined to be civil when he saw the visitor was Treen, and that Treen was not in the formal parlor but inspecting the morning room, which had yet to be cleared of its extra trunks and furniture to make the study Joseph was planning.

“Sir Joseph. Thank you for receiving me.” Treen tugged off his glove and advanced with his hand out. Joseph didn’t see how he could disoblige by not shaking the man’s hand, but Treen’s palm was limp and damp. He eyed Joseph’s glove, marked with green dust, and then the rest of his attire, his plain coat and leather breeches.

Clearly the neighborhood expected the new baronet to make a better account of himself than showing up in his dirt in his drawing room. Well, until Joseph found a way to make something of his land, he would be out upon it, and the neighborhood would simply have to acknowledge that the new baronet was not the fop his predecessor had been.

“Mr. Treen. I would have make myself better available had I known you intended to call.” Joseph’s tone held a hint of frost. He didn’t wish to alienate the man, someone his own age and near his own standing, but Treen’s ability to mushroom everywhere was becoming damned inconvenient.

“I was in the area, so thought I’d look in. Talk a bit more about continuing the agreement I had with your cousin.”