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They drove into the yard and stopped. There was a wait while the groom got down and opened the door, and Ellie saw he was trying to pick his way through the mud to preserve the shine on his gleaming boots. He was unsuccessful.
‘There’s stepping stones, of sorts, to the front door, Miss Lytton,’ he volunteered. ‘I’d take my hand if I were you, miss.’
‘Let me.’ Blake eased past her and down onto a flat stone just as a man came round the corner of a farm building, a black and white dog slinking at his heels, belly to the ground. ‘Good afternoon!’
‘Aye.’ The man wore boots and gaiters, old breeches and a vast frieze coat. He made no effort to remove the hat from his straggling brown hair.
‘This is Carndale Farm?’
‘Aye.’
Ellie could tell Blake was becoming irritated, but he kept his voice pleasant. ‘And you are…?’
‘Ebenezer Grimshaw. He who farms this,’ he added, in a tone that suggested that the information had cost him actual money to part with.
‘Right. Well, I am Lord Hainford and this is Miss Lytton, who owns the farm. Your landlady, in fact.’
‘Aye. Yon lawyer wrote and said as you’d be coming up. Got a key, have you?’ He jerked his head towards the farmhouse. ‘Don’t have nothing to do with the dwelling. Don’t rent that. Just the shippons and the byres. You mind your feet…that’s reet clarty underfoot.’
He turned and stamped off through the mud.
‘Helpful,’ Blake remarked. ‘Could you make that out through the whiskers and the accent? He rents the farm buildings, but not the house. And I suspect he was warning us about the mud.’
‘Kind of him.’ Ellie looked down. ‘Rather more than mud, I suspect. I do have the key.’ She produced it from her reticule, where it had been shedding rust, and handed it to Blake. ‘I would be obliged if you would get the door open and evict any chickens, or sheep, or whatever else is inside.’
She had to joke or she would simply burst into tears. And she would not allow that to happen.
It began to drizzle, and fine rain was blown into her face as she stood in the carriage doorway, watching Blake negotiate his way to the front door. There was a handkerchief in her reticule. She pulled it free, shook out the rust flakes and blew her nose defiantly.
I will not cry.
The farmer, Mr Grimshaw, trudged back around the corner. ‘The back yard’s not in with mine, missus, nor the sheds out there neither,’ he said when he was standing in front of her. ‘And there’s wood chopped in the back porch. Happen some of it’ll be dry.’
He turned round and walked away again before she could respond.
The front door opened with an eldritch shriek suitable to a Gothic novel and Blake vanished inside, into the gloom. Ellie sat back on the deep, luxurious upholstery with an instinct to cling to the vanishing threads of comfort and waited for him to reappear.
*
How long since the place had been lived in? A year, Rampion had said. It looked more like ten. It was bone-cold, thick with dust and cobwebs, and the furniture belonged to some distant decade of the past century. Blake walked through the ground floor—a sitting room, a big kitchen, various other rooms he could not judge the use of—then went upstairs. Four bedchambers and a staircase that must lead to the attics.
What the devil was that lawyer doing, sending Eleanor all that way to this? It was impossible.
He went out, re-crossed the mud to where she sat in the carriage, her hands neatly folded on her reticule, her pale oval face perfectly composed. Her no
se was pink at the tip and her hair, rebelliously escaping from under her bonnet, was the only sign that something more than a meek spinster lurked inside the simple clothing. She had resumed her blacks.
‘It is impossible,’ he said bluntly.
She winced. ‘It is my home now.’
‘It is miles from anywhere. Cold, filthy.’
‘There are logs, apparently. We have brought food and oil lamps and candles. Bedding.’
‘I am not leaving you here with a man we know nothing about lurking in the cattle sheds and no way to get to a village, let alone Lancaster.’
‘There is no option. This—’ she jabbed a finger at the muddy ground ‘—is all I have.’
