Page 23 of How to Tempt An Earl (Wed Within a Year #2)

October, 1826

E llen’s prayers had been answered. She’d prayed for a man and she’d been given one. In a most circuitous way, and not in the straightforward form one might expect, but they’d been answered, giving credence to the oft-heard platitude that God worked in mysterious ways and by His own divine timeline, which had not neatly aligned with hers. Still, at the last moment, the water had delivered her a man, just as a river long ago had delivered baby Moses to the Pharoah’s daughter.

Ellen set down her heavy market basket and raised a hand to shield her eyes from the brightness of the autumn afternoon. In the distance in the field, she could see him, her river man, scything the wheat, with his shirt off, his chest and back gleaming with the sweat of exertion. She told herself she stared for medical reasons. She wanted to be sure he wasn’t overworking. Just a month ago, he’d been abed, weak and helpless.

But the honest part of her knew she stared because she was a woman and he was a man—a handsome man—who lived in close proximity with her and about whom she knew very little and because pleasant surprises were rare in her world. Quakers eschewed luxury of all kinds, and surprises were a type of luxury. Plainness was preferred: plainness of dress, plainness of life, routine over upset.

Her brothers worked alongside him: twelve-year-old Philip and thirteen-year-old Andrew. She could hear their laughter faint on the breeze. Her man from the water was good with them. He treated them as if they were men, his equals. He did not condescend to them even as he kept them in line. Her brothers did have a rambunctious streak. He must have brothers of his own.

She didn’t know because he didn’t know. He didn’t know his family. He didn’t know his name. Had no idea how he’d come to be in the water or in possession of a knife wound on his arm. From the looks of things today, that wound had healed well enough for him to swing the scythe and she was grateful for it. She’d been concerned about her ability to bring in the harvest. She and her siblings couldn’t do it alone. She’d have lost the farm. The community would have asked her to relinquish it to a man who was more capable, or to take a husband—likely Francis Hartlett, a heavy-set, dour widower twice her age who’d been looking to join their lands since her father had died last year. She’d not been amenable to it, so she’d prayed for a man, someone to deliver her from that fate.

God had sent her the water man. Peter, they called him, because Jesus had fished Peter from the rocks and, whether this man knew it or not, he’d become their rock, their protection. For now… The Lord gaveth but inevitably the Lord also took away.

But not too soon, she hoped. Ellen picked up her market basket with a sigh and made her way towards her men in the field. There’d been a story in a London paper that had made its way to their isolated village which niggled at her. A story about an accident in Wapping…a dead man with a knife wound recovered and another man missing. There’d been no further details. The article had been careful not to speculate, or perhaps the author had been encouraged to keep the details out of the public eye.

She was just making trouble, letting her imagination run away with her because part of her refused to accept that things had worked out and that everything would be fine. She wasn’t used to things working out. Her father had only had a cough. He was supposed to have got well. He hadn’t. Still, there seemed a little chance that the man she’d found on the beach was in any way connected to the incident in Wapping.

Peter raised his hand when he saw her coming and reached for his shirt, motioning for her brothers to do the same. Such a gentleman, Peter was. She’d noted his manners immediately. Even lying abed recovering, he’d been full of ‘please’s and ‘thank you’s for her efforts.

‘Let me take that.’ He reached for her basket, lifting it from her arm with a smile.

‘You’re not overdoing it, are you?’ she asked, looking him over. He glowed with ruddy health these days. It was hard to reconcile the man who’d walked beside her with the one Andrew and Philip had carried back to the house in a stretcher made of an old quilt.

‘Not at all. We should have the wheat in by tomorrow.’ At the little cottage, he held the door open for her and allowed her to precede him inside. Anne was in the kitchen, making preparations for supper. He set the basket on the table and peeked beneath its cover. ‘Did you get a good price for your eggs?’

‘Yes, enough to pay the miller to grind the wheat.’ Which meant they could sell flour, and that meant income. She didn’t dare hope it would go far enough but it would be a start.

‘I’m glad.’ He smiled and she felt herself melt with its warmth. She’d never seen a smile like his. Nor eyes like his—the colour of chocolate. ‘The boys can finish up on their own. We were nearly done. Let me wash up first and then perhaps we can take a walk. I want to talk with you about something.’

That sounded ominous. Did he want to discuss leaving? Had he remembered something?

Please, Lord, don’t take him from me yet , she prayed. I still need him.

When would be a good time? her conscience mocked.

After the harvest there would be winter preparations to make, the roof to see to. Winter would make the roads and sea hard to travel on. Perhaps she could convince him to stay until spring? But then there’d be the planting to do, and the cultivating all summer. By the time he had washed himself, her stomach was in knots.

You’re being ridiculous , she scolded herself. He has to leave at some point.

Peter offered his arm to her and they headed down the lane towards the beach, not that they’d walk that far.

‘I was thinking, the day after tomorrow, the boys and I would go over to the Pratts’ and help bring their crop in. Daniel Pratt doesn’t have any sons to help.’ The Pratts were her neighbours two miles away on the other side from Francis Hartlett. ‘But only if you can spare us. If there’s nothing else that needs doing here?’

‘No, not at all.’ Relief flooded her. He wasn’t going to leave. ‘It’s kind of you to think of them.’ She smiled up at him and he smiled back, another melting smile that had her insides warming, her mind coming to life with a hundred dangerous fantasies.

What would it be like to be married to a man like him who was kind and considerate? Someone who consulted her; who enquired about her day and the things that were important to her, such as the eggs and mill money? That was not the sort of man Francis Hartlett was. But they were fantasies only. She could not marry a man with nothing, not even his own name. Someday his memories would return and then what? What if he remembered he had a wife and family somewhere else?

‘How was the market other than good egg prices?’ he asked. ‘Any news of interest?’

Ellen worried her lip. Ought she tell him about the news story? What if it triggered his memories? He would leave then. What if she didn’t and he heard the story first from someone else? He would know she’d withheld information from him. He would not respect that.

But, Lord, I need him , came her selfish prayer. I don’t want to marry Francis Hartlett. I don’t want to lose my father’s farm and be taken into someone else’s home like a poor relation, to have my family split up. They’re all I have left.

What had she done in her life to deserve such suffering?

‘What is it, Ellen? Is there bad news?’ Her hesitation had alerted him and he was all concern, those soft brown eyes fixed on her. She could not lie, and omissions were a type of lie.

‘There was a newspaper in town, quite an old one—you know we don’t get a timely paper here. There was a story in it. It’s probably nothing, I don’t want to get your hopes up.’ Or to set hers down, but she was nothing if not honest.

* * *

Peter felt her hand tighten on his arm and he knew—she thought the story had something to do with him. She was frightened to tell him, his brave Ellen who’d taken in a half-dead stranger from the sea because her conscience had demanded it, even when her pocketbook couldn’t afford it. His eyes had missed nothing in the days of his recovery, when he’d been able to do nothing more than lie in bed and watch life in the cottage. He wasn’t supposed to notice that she’d given up her bed for him in exchange for a pallet beside the fire so that he might rest, or that she’d often slipped her portion of supper to him so that he might have a faster recovery. But he had noticed.

‘Whatever it is, Ellen, it doesn’t mean I’ll leave,’ he promised. He owed her. She’d invested resources in saving his life, resources she could not easily spare. He knew enough from the boys’ chatter in the field that she was being pressed to marry, an arrangement that was unsatisfactory to all of them…and to him. He wasn’t staying simply to satisfy a return on her investment. He wanted to stay. He liked life in the little farmhouse: the simple, hearty meals at the wood plank table; the warmth of the worn handmade quilts at night; the close company of the four siblings. Had his old life contained such elements? Was that why he found comfort in them—because somewhere in his mind he’d known this life?

‘There was an incident in Wapping. A man died. His body was found, dragged out of the river. But the other man was not found.’

Peter furrowed his brow. ‘Do you think there’s a chance I am the missing man? That seems…far-fetched. We’re a long way from Wapping.’

‘The dead man had a knife wound,’ Ellen added quietly. ‘His proved fatal, just as yours so easily could have. He was pulled from the water as you were, just different water. He was found but you were lost.’

He could see the picture she was piecing together in her head: there’d been a knife fight on a wharf in Wapping that had progressed to the water where he’d been successful in killing the other man. ‘You think I am a killer?’ he asked in quiet shock. Was he? Did that feel right?

‘No!’ she was quick to rejoin, regret flashing in her pretty blue eyes. From her horrified expression he could see that she’d not thought the scenario all the way through, to the conclusions and consequences of accepting the picture she was constructing.

Even with her quick abnegation, the picture she offered certainly didn’t feel flattering. What would that make him—a criminal? Was he even now being hunted by the law in conjunction with the murder? A flash of panic took him at the thought. ‘Do you want me to leave?’

The words were hard to say. He didn’t want to leave. He liked it here. It felt right. In a world where he had no basis in fact for who he was or where he’d come from, he had only echoes in his bones, feelings of comfort, of what he might have known some part before. A large family, a cozy home, a certain familial rumbustiousness felt right, felt natural. In the months he’d been here, those things had become his tenuous anchor to this new reality. He did not want to let them go. They were all he had.

She shook her head, a strand of her wheaten hair falling loose. ‘You do not need to go.’ She paused, the conversation making her obviously miserable. ‘It is rather mad, isn’t it? Too far-fetched that you would be the man from Wapping.’ She was looking for assurance.

‘I cannot say. It all seems a bit dramatic.’ It was the most he could give her by way of assurance. The dangerous nugget of ‘what if’ had burrowed quickly in his mind and had taken efficient root. He had the scar of a knife wound. Even if he wasn’t the man from Wapping, he was a violent man. Violence had no place in a Quaker community. He stopped in the lane to face her. ‘I do not want to bring you trouble.’

Panic streaked her gaze. ‘I want you to stay.’ The words came out in a rush.

He gently gripped her upper arms, suddenly desperate to make her understand. ‘I know about Widower Hartlett. I wouldn’t want him to make a scandal for you because of me, to have him use me against you to force your hand. A man of violence has no place here.’

How long could he last here before the community began to question his origins, his intentions? Time was passing. Any day, now that the harvest was nearly in, people would turn their attentions in his direction and he didn’t think the gossip would go well for Ellen or him. The community would push for marriage or exile. Neither was a palatable option. He could offer Ellen nothing as a husband, not even a name. And he was not ready to leave. She needed him here. In his own way, he needed to be here. He needed to be with her. He did not want to leave her .

Widower Hartlett was just the internal threat. Discovery was the external threat. ‘What if I killed that man? What if the law comes looking for me?’ He could not bring that sort of danger to her home.

Her blue eyes held his. ‘We will hide you.’

He frowned. ‘The village will not tolerate it. Someone in the village will give me away.’ Especially if there was a reward. Widower Hartlett would certainly inform on him, even without a reward, if it cleared his path to Ellen. ‘I would not want you to be seen to be deliberately aiding me.’

In the span of a short walk, he’d become dangerous to her. It was the last thing he’d intended after all her kindnesses to him. He really should go. He would take his new name with him and go and build a new life somewhere. The prospect did not excite him; it saddened him.

‘Please don’t go, not yet.’ She whispered the words, her eyes pleading in desperation. ‘Not until we know something more.’

‘More’ being the return of his memories, which would commit him to his life in the past. ‘More’ being further proof that connected him to the missing man in Wapping.

‘Yes.’ He breathed his promise. ‘I will stay.’ He would not abandon her. It was not what a gentleman did. It was not what a protector did. A man did not run at the first hint of potential trouble. A man did not seek his own self-preservation at the expense of others’ needs. He put others he cared for ahead of self. That felt right.

Ellen’s arms were around his neck and she pressed him close in a tight hug. ‘Thank you…’ She breathed; her relief palpable against his body—a body that had not forgotten how to rouse to a woman. Holding her in his arms felt right. And, for that, he would stay as long as the fates allowed.

* * * * *

Read on for an extract from HASTILY WED TO THE DUKE by Sadie King