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“Are you?”
“They rushed the work for the guests,” Kenver told himself. “My mother would do a great deal to impress a duke.”
Sarah nodded.
“I hope it was competently done.”
“Your mother probably stood over Hicks and made sure of it,” Sarah said.
Kenver snorted a laugh. The picture was all too plausible.
“Now that there was someoneworthyto stay there,” she added drily.
He shifted uneasily. “As soon as this visit is over, we will move in there.”
“Shift our things in the dead of night?” she asked. “Perform a fait accompli? It sounds like a ballet leap, doesn’t it?”
“What?” It was a joke. Dry humor lurked in her blue eyes. The arrival of her friends had enlivened her. He felt a wave of affection for this girl he had taken as his wife, followed by a burst of desire.
It was maddening that he couldn’t take her in his arms and cover her with kisses. If he swept her up and carried her off to his room… He would find his valet there, and that extremely correct, aging gentleman’s gentleman would be overcome with embarrassment. Kenver could so easily visualize the aghast expression, the fumbling apologies, the small items dropped in hasty retreat. Snatched up, dropped again, muttered chagrin. Not a romantic scene.
Footsteps sounded at the end of the corridor. His mother appeared, coming to her bedchamber. She stopped and stared at them as if they were doing something revolting.
“Good night,” Sarah said and disappeared into her room.
Kenver nodded to his mother, wished for a font of wisdom to consult, and headed out to walk the grounds again.
The Terefords’ traveling carriage was brought round early the next morning, and the duke and duchess, Sarah and Kenver climbed aboard as an ample picnic hamper was tied onto the back. One of the Poldene stable boys sat next to the coachman on the box ready to direct him. Kenver had said that although the distance was not long to Tresigan, the tangle of lanes could be confusing.
It was a golden late-summer day, and Sarah felt a giddy relief at being on an outing with friends, away from the disapproving gaze of the countess. For hours! She and Cecelia exchanged news. The duke offered tidbits about doings in London. And if Kenver looked surprised at their easy chatter, Sarah didn’t mind showing him that she was more than a country nobody.
Less than an hour later, they turned from the country lane into a weed-grown drive. It didn’t look as if any vehicle had passed along it in months. Blackthorn thickets reared up on both sides, threatening to engulf them. They had to slow for a series of deep ruts. “This does not bode well,” said the duke.
A length of briar, tossed by the breeze, latched onto the coachman’s hat and pulled it off. He grabbed for it and missed, with an angry exclamation. The groom from Poldene jumped down, retrieved it, and climbed nimbly to the box again.
“Not well at all,” added the duke.
They edged around the rampant bushes, thorns scraping on both sides of the carriage. Sarah heard the coachman mutter about paintwork as they emerged into a clearer space, only to confront a positive riot of vegetation.
“My God, it really is covered in ivy,” said the duke.
“It looks like a fairy mound,” said Sarah.
Vines flowed from the top of a fifty-foot cliff some distance away. The ivy snaked across a few yards of garden and up over a building, wrapping around it like a mottled green scarf. The ivy leaves, stirring in a soft breeze, obscured details, but Sarah could just make out a blocky two-story house. Bits of a peaked roof poked through here and there. Ivy tendrils reached out as if waving at them, looking for further supports.
The driver pulled up, and they got down from the carriage. The duke discovered a line of overgrown flagstones that led toward the front of the mound. And the door, Sarah assumed. They picked their way along it, tall weeds catching at their skirts and coattails.
“We should have brought a scythe,” said the duchess.
“And someone to wield it,” replied her husband. “In fact, I begin to wonder why I travel anywhere these days without a full crew of workmen at my back.”
Sarah started to suggest that there were plenty of local people looking for work. Just in time, she realized he’d been joking.
“I don’t suppose we have anything like a key?” the duke asked his wife.
“Oh, have you found a door?”
“No, but…”
