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“Of course, I am fond of her!” The icy glare would have felled a lesser man. “It is because I am that I am also worried about her. The woods near your estate in Yorkshire are rife with the beggars and thieves who were once in His Majesty’s army. It is shameful that their service is no longer needed to fight, but neither were there any jobs to be found for them when they returned home.”
It was a sad statement of fact, but the woods around London were filled with those same beggars. Men, many of whom had no home or family to go home to, who had served in Wellington’s army but whose regiments had been disbanded now that Napoleon was once again captured and banished to the remote island of St. Helena.
He frowned. “You are glaring at me as if I am solely to blame for the fate of these men.”
“Because as far as these particular men are concerned, you are,” Lady Margaret snapped. “All of them worked on your estate until they accepted the king’s shilling and joined the army. Because they were recruited from your estate, they were placed in the same regiment as yourself.”
This was the first Hunter had heard of it.
Which, if it were true, was a shameful admission on his part.
Had he really been so blind as not to realize some of the men who’d followed him into battle for all these years were actually from his own Yorkshire estate? He believed that might indeed be the case, from the contemptuous way in which Lady Margaret was looking down her nose at him.
“By the time those men returned from battle, your new estate manager had replaced them and evicted their families from the tied cottages,” Lady Margaret admonished. “What choice did those men have then but to turn to thievery, and now kidnapping, in order to be able to take care of their families?”
“I had no idea…”
“Why should you when you never come to your estate in Yorkshire,” she scorned.
He winced at the intended rebuke. “My estate manager really dispossessed these valiant men of their jobs and homes whilst they were away fighting for king and country?”
“Without a qualm,” Lady Margaret snapped. “Not because he is an unfeeling or cruel man, but because his own job might have been in jeopardy if his books had not shown a profit each year by the selling of the harvest. He also has a wife and young family to provide for.”
Hunter felt a warmth in his cheeks as he heard the admonishment in her tone. At the same time, he also recalled that the profits from his Yorkshire estate had not suffered in the slightest since he’d employed the new manager after the death of the old one two years ago. Now he knew the reason why they hadn’t.
He had thought Ben Watkins to be a hard but capable man when he interviewed and employed him. But Hunter’s only knowledge of the other man’s capabilities these past two years had been from the accounts Watkins sent to him each quarter.
It seemed he was guilty of far worse crimes than ignoring his ward for all these years.
The thought of Evelyn now being the prisoner of such desperate and belligerent men sent a cold shiver down his spine.
But neither did he intend to just hand over a thousand pounds before he had learned more of the situation and could be assured his ward would be released once the money had been paid.
CHAPTERTHREE
“I told you the duke would not pay,” Evelyn repeated dully. It had now been two weeks since the ransom note had been delivered to Lincoln Grange. Still there’d been no response from Lady Hathaway or the duke.
The unkempt men seated about the campfire, spooning poached venison into their greedy mouths made into a stew which Evie had prepared for them only this morning, paused long enough in that endeavor to look at her with varying degrees of displeasure.
“He would be more inclined to celebrate my disappearance than be concerned about it,” she added, having lost her own appetite. She now stared morosely into her own bowl of stew rather than ate it.
“’E’ll pay,” Paul Harker, a man aged in his late forties and their leader, stated grimly.
“If ’e doesna, ye can stay ’ere and cook farus,” the one known as Davie announced happily. He was younger than the other five men, and unmarried. But there was nothing wrong with his appetite, and no doubt the idea of having a woman living here and cooking for them appealed to him.
Evie had attempted to escape on the fourth day of her captivity, only to fail and now find herself tethered to a stake driven deep into the ground. The length of rope tied about her waist only allowed her to reach as far as the fire, enabling her to cook, and no farther.
This camp, deep in the woods where these desperate men made their home, had only a canopy of trees overhead to protect them from inclement weather. Their beds consisted of several layers of fern fronds to protect them from some of the hardness of the ground, with a ragged blanket pulled over them at night, if they were lucky enough to own one. Several of the gowns and a cloak from Evie’s trunk had been utilized to add to their comfort in that regard. She had been instructed to keep herself warm by using the cloak she had been wearing when she was taken. It was a poor and uncomfortable way to live.
If the Duke of Lincoln did not respond to the ransom note soon, and she genuinely had reason to believe he would not, this damp forest might be where she ended her days too.
She had been made very aware of that gentleman’s reluctance to have anything to do with her when the two met five years ago.
To a fourteen-year-old girl, he had appeared very handsome, even if it was in a thrillingly remote and autocratic way. His dark auburn hair, obviously inherited from his father, had been short and styled about those arrogantly aristocratic features: eyes of a light green the same color as moss, high cheekbones either side of a straight slash of a nose, his lips thin and chiseled, his jaw square and determined.
Unfortunately, those handsome looks did not excuse the coldness the duke had shown toward her when he sent her and her companion away and then proceeded to forget about their existence for the next five years.
Something which Evie had intended to redress by appearing on the doorstep of Lincoln House in London anddemandingto be seen and heard rather than left to moulder in Yorkshire until she was old and gray herself. The duke might have no use for her or the memories her existence represented to him, but Evie did not want to die without ever having really been allowed to live.
