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James backed hastily out. He thought of the shuttered rooms on the upper floors. Were they all…? But perhaps only this one was a mare’s nest. He walked across the entryway and tried the door on the left. It concealed a larger room in the same wretched condition. His heart, which had not been precisely singing, sank. He’d assumed that his new position would require a good deal of tedious effort, but he hadn’t expected chaos.
The click of footsteps approached from outside. The front door was still open, and now a fashionably dressed young lady walked through it. She was accompanied by a maid and a footman. The latter started to shut the door behind them. “Don’t,” commanded James. The young servant shied like a nervous horse.
“What is that smell?” the lady inquired, putting a gloved hand to her nose.
“What are you doing here?” James asked the bane of his existence.
“You mentioned that you were going to look over the house today.”
“And in what way is this your concern?”
“I was so curious. There are all sorts of rumors about this place. No one has been inside for years.” She went over to one of the parlor doors and peered around it. “Oh!” She crossed to look into the other side. “Good heavens!”
“Indeed.”
“Well, this is going to be a great deal of work.” She smiled. “You won’t like that.”
“You have no idea what I…” James had to stop, because he knew that she had a very good idea.
“I know more about your affairs than you do,” she added.
It was nearly true. Once, it certainly had been. That admission took him back thirteen years to his first meeting with Cecelia Vainsmede. He’d been just fifteen, recently orphaned, and in the midst of a blazing row with his new trustee. Blazing on his side, at any rate. Nigel Vainsmede had been pained and evasive and clearly just wishing James would go away. They’d fallen into one of their infuriating bouts of pushing in and fending off, insisting and eluding. James had understood by that time that his trustee might agree to a point simply to be rid of him, but he would never carry through with any action. Vainsmede would forget—willfully, it seemed to James. Insultingly.
And then a small blond girl had marched into her father’s library and ordered them to stop at once. Even at nine years old, Cecelia had been a determined character with a glare far beyond her years. James had been surprised into silence. Vainsmede had actually looked grateful. And on that day they had established the routine that allowed them to function for the next ten years—speaking to each other only through Cecelia. James would approach her with “Please tell your father.” And she would manage the matter, whatever it was. James didn’t have to plead, which he hated, and Nigel Vainsmede didn’t have to do anything at all, which was his main hope in life as far as James could tell.
James and Cecelia had worked together all through their youth. Cecelia was not a friend, and not family, but some indefinable other sort of close connection. And she did know a great deal about him. More than he knew about her. Although he had observed, along with the rest of thehaut ton, that she had grown up to be a very pretty young lady. Today in a walking dress of sprig muslin and a straw bonnet decorated with matching blue ribbons, she was lithely lovely. Her hair was less golden than it had been at nine but far better cut. She had the face of a renaissance Madonna except for the rather too lush lips. And her luminous blue eyes missed very little, as he had cause to know. Not that any of this was relevant at the moment. “Your father has not been my trustee for three years,” James pointed out.
“And you have done nothing much since then.”
He would have denied it, but what did it matter? Instead he said, “I never could understand why my father appointedyourfather as my trustee.”
“It was odd,” she said.
“They were just barely friends, I would say.”
“Hardly that,” she replied. “Papa was astonished when he heard.”
“As was I.” James remembered the bewildered outrage of his fifteen-year-old self when told that he would be under the thumb of a stranger until he reached the age of twenty-five. “And, begging your pardon, but your father is hardly a pattern card of wisdom.”
“No. He is indolent and self-centered. Almost as much as you are.”
“Why, Miss Vainsmede!” He rarely called her that. They had dropped formalities and begun using first names when she was twelve. “I am not the least indolent.”
She hid a smile. “Only if you count various forms of sport. Which I do not. I have thought about the trusteeship, however. From what I’ve learned of your father—I did not know him of course—I think he preferred to be in charge.”
A crack of laughter escaped James. “Preferred! An extreme understatement. He had the soul of an autocrat and the temper of a frustrated tyrant.”
She frowned at him. “Yes. Well. Having heard something of that, I came to the conclusion that your father chose mine because he was confident Papa would do nothing in particular.”
“What?”
“I think that your father disliked the idea of not being…present to oversee your upbringing, and he couldn’t bear the idea of anyonedoinganything about that.”
James frowned as he worked through this convoluted sentence.
“And so he chose my father because he was confident Papa wouldn’t…bestir himself and try to make changes in the arrangements.”
Surprise kept James silent for a long moment. “You know that is the best theory I have heard. It might even be right.”
