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  “Didn’t no one tell you, my lord? She’s gone, vanished. Bed not slept in this morning.”

  “And no one thought to tell me!” The long night and day of anxiety erupted suddenly into rage as he turned on Kate. “No wonder you have been laughing up your sleeve at me all this time. No doubt you knew you would prove indispensable in the end.”

  “Laughing? I?” She had crossed the room to embrace the children and looked at him across Sue’s shoulder, tears of relief streaming down her face. “Are you suggesting, my lord, that I was a party to this infamous business? Because, If so, I wish to hand in my notice. This moment.”

  “Father,” said Sue.

  And, “Kate,” said Mrs. Warrender.

  There was a long, strained silence, broken at last by Harriet, who burst into tears. “I want to go to bed,” she wailed.

  “And so you shall.” Kate picked her up. “We will discuss this, my lord, in the morning, when you have slept.”

  “When I am sober, you would say? Very well, Miss Warrender, the morning let it be.”

  Chapter Nine

  Much though they disliked it, each for her own reasons, Kate and her mother had to spend that night at the hall. The children simply would not be parted from Kate, and Mrs. Warrender gave orders for their old room to be made ready.

  “I should consult his lordship, ma’am?” Parsons had returned from the search, haggard with lack of sleep like the rest of them.

  “I wouldn’t if I were you,” said Mrs. Warrender. “Send him some food to the study and let’s cross our bridges in the morning, Parsons.”

  Morning brought no news of the fugitives. “I suppose once they found the children gone they took to their heels.” Mrs. Warrender was sharing nursery breakfast with Kate and the children. Harriet and Sue had both had nightmares and Giles was very quiet. As for Kate, she looked as if she had not slept at all, and her mother thought she probably had not, torn as she was between rage with Lord Hawth and concern for the children.

  Parsons, who had brought the nursery breakfast himself, reported that Lord Hawth was still asleep. “He was worn out, miss. Not himself last night.”

  So the servants knew all about what had happened. It was inevitable, and merely another last straw. The furious thoughts chased themselves round and round in Kate’s head. Hawth had actually hinted at some kind of complicity between her and Nurse Simmonds. She longed to tell him of her visit to Brown, the message to Ned Ludd which had surely been responsible for the children’s release. But that was to tell him of Kit Warrender, and she would rather die than do that.

  The morning dragged, with hardly a pretence at lessons, and Kate was reading aloud to the children when a footman appeared to summon her to the study.

  “Just me?” She flashed a glance of appeal to where her mother sat working by the window.

  “Yes, miss. He said so quite particular.”

  “Oh, me!” Kate rose to her feet, cast a depressed glance at the pallid reflection in the glass, managed a wavering smile for her mother and prepared to leave the room.’

  “I want to come, too,” said Giles.

  “And me.” Harriet jumped down from her chair.

  “I’m afraid not, bless your hearts.” Kate found her eyes suddenly filled with tears,

  “Well, if he sends you away, tell him we’ll go, too,” said Giles.

  “You’re keeping Lord Hawth waiting, dear,” reminded Mrs. Warrender.

  “And that would never do.” The children’s demonstration had given Kate back a little spirit. She wiped a brisk hand across her eyes and made her way to the study.

  Lord Hawth was waiting for her, standing impatiently at the study window. She had seen her father on too many mornings-after not to recognise his state at once. She could almost have felt sorry for him if his bad temper had not been so obvious.

  “Sit down, Miss Warrender.” He kept his own place by the window. “I think I have to beg your pardon.” He had clearly rehearsed the short speech and it came out with a kind of angry lack of conviction. “If I said anything, last night,” he went on, “that might suggest I thought you connected in any way with the children’s abduction, I wish to apologise and withdraw it unreservedly.”

  “Thank you, my lord.” Her tone was as formally colourless as his.

  “Good.” He was glad to have it over. “Parsons tells me that Nurse Simmonds was seen several times with Tom Bowles. We must assume, I think, that she has gone with him.”

  “Good riddance,” said Kate.

  “Yes. You will stay, of course.”

  “Of course?” She considered it then: “Yes, my lord, I will stay. The children need me. You have not asked how they are this morning.”

  “I have not asked you, Miss Warrender. Will you be surprised to hear that it was on my instructions that Parsons served the nursery breakfast? He tells me that Sue and Harriet had nightmares and even Giles looks far from well. I can see for myself that you have not had much sleep. I rely on you to see that things go on as quietly as possible for the next few days. I would be grateful if you and your mother would stay here, at the hall, until the children are quite recovered from their experience. I have written this morning to a cousin of mine—a Miss Lintott—suggesting that she make her home here until the children are grown up. When she arrives, you and your mother will be able to return to the Dower House.”

  “Thank you.” She made him an angry curtsy. “But surely you’ll not need us if your cousin is to take over here?”

  “Not need you! Good God, you don’t know my Cousin Lintott. As helpless a female as ever drew thread. But she will add some touch of respectability to the children’s situation.”

  “Thank you again.”

  “You persist in misunderstanding me, Miss Warrender. You know as well as I do—” He broke off. “Damnation! What’s the use!” He picked up his gloves. “I am leaving at once for Brighton, so you will not be troubled with my company.”

  “Nor he with ours,” Kate summed it up for her mother. “He’ll stay away, I take it, until the threadless cousin is safely installed. We’re not respectable enough, it seems, you and I!”

  “Kate, dear, be reasonable. We’re not kin, that’s all. He’s right, and you know it.”

  “Nothing will make me like it. If only there was somewhere we could go!”

  “But there isn’t, Kate, and anyway you know we can’t possibly leave the children now. And—” she put a pleading hand on Kate’s—“he did apologise. Think what that must have cost him.”

  “I should say! You should just have heard him.” At last she could laugh at it. “Getting each word out as if it choked him. I wish the Prince Regent joy of his company, if he continues in his present mood.”

  Lord Hawth had indeed left the hall in a combination of hangover and rage that took him flaming across the downs to Warren House, where he felt in honour bound to stop and thank George Warren for his help in the search for the children. The surprising result of this visit was a growing friendship between the two men. One of its bases was a strong, shared, tacit dislike for Kate Warrender, and George Warren made no attempt to reinstate his ruined dinner party. Riding with the Glinde harriers, shooting with his new friend, who often spent the night at the Warren rather than return to Brighton, he forgot to be homesick for America and had not much time to pursue Lucy Penfold either. In fact, he found himself less and less inclined to do so. For one thing, sight of her blonde prettiness somehow always put him in mind of Miss Warrender, handsome and disagreeable in dark green. For another, he soon noticed the ogling glances Lucy bestowed on Lord Hawth.

  “Fetching little hussy,” said Hawth one bright October morning when they had encountered her in the stable yard. “What do you reckon to do about her?”

  “Do?”

  Hawth laughed. “Quite right. None of my business. But you maybe don’t understand how gossip runs in these parts. Word is, you’re thinking of marrying the girl.”

  “Do you know,” slowly, “I actu
ally was.” The past tense said it all.

  “Would you like me to take her off your hands? The mother’s a tartar, I believe.”

  “No thanks. I’ll deal with it. Funny thing.” George Warren ran a meditative hand along his horse’s saddle as he prepared to mount. “I heard a rumour you were contemplating marriage yourself.”

  “Not a word of truth in it,” said Hawth cheerfully. “Oh, I know there’s talk. No wonder. I started it myself. Thought it would make things easier for those cousins of yours, coming to live at the Dower House.”

  “Thoughtful of you.”

  Hawth gave a bark of laughter. “Not really. Or … enlightened self-interest. Don’t want a hell brew of scandal on my own doorstep, specially not where the children are concerned. They’ve trouble enough as it is, poor little bastards.”

  “Nothing you can do for them?”

  “You mean marry their mother? I thank you, no. Money they’ll have. That’s of course. I expect they’ll do well enough. Spunky lot. I tell you, I was proud of them that night they were kidnapped. Stood up to that. Stood up to me. Young Sue came home and told me to have my park wall repaired. I’ve done it, too. Deuced inconvenient for the smugglers, but I can’t help that.”

  “You mean you knew about the gap?”

  “Of course I knew. Everyone knew. Used all the time. I reckon Tom Bowles is more afraid, now, of his smuggling friends than of the law.”

  “He was one of them?”

  “Naturally. A key man, I’ve always thought. Well, stands to reason a good deal of the stuff is run by way of the Tidemills. Keep a store untidy enough, which God knows Tom Bowles did, and who’s to tell run goods from legal? That reminds me, high time I found a new storekeeper for the Tidemills. One of my responsibilities as landlord, it seems. Would you like me to offer the job to young John Penfold? He’s a quick scholar, your Futherby tells me, can read and write and reckon with the best of them. And he’d have a house with the job. Take his mother and sister off your hands.”

  “Oh, yes,” said George Warren. And then:

  “Thanks.”

  “Don’t thank me. Thank Futherby. Manages us all, that man, and for our own good, which is hard to bear. I suppose it will mean young John Penfold gets mixed up with the smugglers, but that’s his worry. Oh—” very casual—“I promised the children I’d take them down to Tidemills one day this week, now I’m back home, let them watch the mill at work. They’ve deserved a treat, and even little Harriet can ride that far, I understand. Care to join us? A deuced dull family party, but the mill itself is worth seeing, and I’d be glad of your company. After all—” he laughed his grating laugh—“you ought to own the place. Do no harm for those radical workers down there to see the two of us on good terms.”

  “Yes. Yes, I’d like to come. Thanks.” But George Warren, who was slowly beginning to learn his way round the intricacies of British society, wondered if Hawth had other motives beside the openly acknowledged one for this rather surprising invitation. Did he think an American interloper good enough for his bastard daughter?

  He was surprised, and, surprisingly, disappointed to discover that Mrs. Warrender and Kate were not to be of the Tidemills party. Joining it at the hall, he found the two ladies there waiting to see off the little cavalcade. “You’re not coming, cousin?” He wished he knew, or dared use, Mrs. Warrender’s first name.

  “We are not invited.” Kate Warrender answered for her mother. “I wish you will help Sue keep an eye on little Harriet, Mr. Warren. She is young for such a long outing.”

  “Disapproving again, Miss Warrender?” Hawth had come silently up behind her. “We will take good care of Harriet, I promise you.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” she said.

  The little cavalcade set off in the best of spirits, the children in high twig over this outing with their father. All but Sue, thought George Warren, riding beside her while Lord Hawth shared his attentions between the two younger ones. George had met the children often enough in Glinde to notice that Sue had changed since the kidnapping. She had been a child. Now she was a young woman, and, he thought, not a happy one. Well, that was understandable. She was old enough, now, to be aware of her anomalous position, and aware, too, he was afraid, of her father’s plans for herself and him.

  What did she think of them? Impossible to tell. Anyway, he did not want to know. She might be a young woman. She was most certainly not the young woman for him. It was an odd thing, but, as with Lucy Penfold, when he looked at Sue’s pensive withdrawn face, what he saw was Miss Warrender, handsome, haughty, intolerable in a dark green dress cut too low by Philadelphia standards. No doubt about it, her presence and her mother’s would have made this party less insipid. Tired of saying polite nothings to Sue and getting paid in his own coin, he left her with an apology, and the groom, and spurred his own horse to join Hawth and the younger children. “Have you heard anything of young Kit Warrender?” he asked.

  “Not a word. He comes and goes like a will-o’-the-wisp, that young man. I’m sorry. I owe him my thanks, Brown tells me, for sending word about the children’s plight to that mysterious Ned Ludd. And there’s another man I wouldn’t mind meeting! Talks riot and revolution at my mill one day, and turns round almost the next to rescue my children. Not that I’m not grateful. And to Kit Warrender. Elusive young devil.”

  “You’re not of a mind with his cousins?”

  “The Warrenders?”

  “They think him beneath their touch. Miss Warrender as good as told me so.”

  “Just like her.” But he was distracted by little Harriet, who was beginning, visibly, to tire, and whose pony was starting to take advantage of her. “Devil take it if Miss Warrender wasn’t right,” he said. “It’s a deuced awkward habit of hers. Now what’s to do?” They were still about half a mile from the village. “Ride on and let the child rest at the inn, or cut our losses and turn back?”

  “It looks like rain.” George Warren was beginning to wish he had never come. “I think we had best turn back.”

  “I’m cold,” said Harriet, through chattering teeth, and settled it.

  “You’ll come back and take a luncheon with us?” said Hawth when they reached the turning to Warren House.

  “I believe not, thanks.” He was glad to escape the sad little party, and Hawth recognised it with a grimace.

  When he rode up at last to the door of Hawth Hall, with Harriet held awkwardly on the front of his saddle while the groom led her pony, he found Kate and Mrs. Warrender waiting for their party. Inevitable, and infuriating. It was raining quite hard now, and all three children were wet and subdued. He carried Harriet indoors and deposited her at Kate’s feet. “You were right and I was wrong,” he told her, without pleasure.

  Busy drying the child’s tears, Kate did not answer.

  “So tedious of it to rain,” said Mrs. Warrender. “Such a bright morning. One would never have thought it.”

  “I would have, if I’d had any sense,” said Hawth.

  “Bed, I think.” Kate picked Harriet up.

  “She’s too heavy for you. I’ll take her.” But Harriet clung to Kate, crying harder than ever, and Hawth muttered an oath and went back out into the rain.

  Half an hour later he arrived, soaking wet, in his curricle at Warren House. “I’m off to Brighton. Care to come too? The Prince Regent’s still there. They’re an amusing crowd, for a while.”

  “No, thanks.” George Warren was in the estate room, poring over some papers. “I asked Futherby for a report on the tenant farms. He’s just brought it. It’s … interesting.”

  “Oh?”

  “They’re in terrible shape. What kind of a man was Charles Warrender? No improvements, old fashioned methods, land wasted on unnecessary fallowing, fields full of something called charlock. Plenty of apples and no cyder press of our own. Hops and no oast house. What do you think of the Suffolk ploughs one hears about, and those new thrashing machines?”

  “I can’t say I know much
about them, except they’re unpopular with the men. Lord Egremont’s got a thrashing machine over at Petworth. Suffolk ploughs too, I believe. If you are thinking of coming out as an improving landlord, maybe you had better come to Brighton and meet him.”

  “He’ll be there? That’s something else again. I’d dearly like to meet him. And not just to talk farming. There’s a painter visits him, a man called Turner. I saw some pictures of his at the Academy. I’m sadly tempted to buy one. Gives you—I don’t know—kind of a feeling of England. And as for meeting him—I’d like that!” He looked embarrassed suddenly. “I paint a little myself.”

  “Good God,” said Lord Hawth, shocked.

  But he took his surprising new friend to Brighton just the same and thought himself bold to introduce him to Lord Egremont. The result was another surprise. Beginning with Turner and landscape painting, the two men were soon deep in discussion of something called the Romantic Movement about which Hawth neither knew nor cared. There was a Mr. Wordsworth, it seemed, who lived in the Lake District, of all barbarous places, and had published, with a friend named Coleridge, a volume called Lyrical Ballads that Warren had read in America. “I thought some of it dull enough stuff,” he said, “but some of it is quite out of the way. I’ve been wishing to travel up to Westmorland to meet Mr. Wordsworth, but there’s been so much to do.”

  “You’d better come and visit me at Petworth,” said Lord Egremont. “I’ve a painter friend of theirs, Mr. Hayden, at the house, and, who knows, we might persuade Mr. Turner to join us and paint you a landscape. They come high, you know.”

  “Five hundred guineas,” said Warren cheerfully, “I do know.”

  Summoned to dine with the Prince Regent at the Pavilion, Lord Hawth returned late and a trifle foxed to find George Warren busy packing. “Tired of Brighton already?” he asked, pouring himself a superogatory glass of port.

  “On the contrary, I find it delightful. We’ve nothing to touch it at home. I must get a house here next summer. I hope you’ll be so good as to advise me. But Lord Egremont proposes to return to Petworth tomorrow, and has invited me to go too, to meet Mr. Hayden and look at his Suffolk ploughs.”