Mistress in the Regency Ballroom: The Rake's Unconventional Mistress / Marrying the Mistress. Juliet Landon

walled kitchen garden like drifts of snow. Wandering alone, Letitia peered into the glass frames while the covers were up, at the strawberry beds white with flowers, at the budding cucumbers, the tiny spears of chicory and lamb’s lettuce. In the furthest corner, the gardener’s son was shovelling gravel on to the path and raking it over. Like coarse oatmeal, Letitia thought, adjusting her spectacles more firmly on to her nose. Fine wisps of hair whirled around her face as gusts of wind moulded her cotton day dress into the contours of her body and, to find a place of shelter, she opened the door of the stone-built potting shed built against the high wall, and entered.

      She was instantly enclosed by the earthy aroma of potted plants and trays of seedlings covered by layers of damp newsprint. Racks of tools hung along one side, with buckets and pots, hoses and string, raffia and bell jars. A long low bench was covered with sacking as if the old gardener had used it to indulge in an occasional nap, and a pile of sacks at one end suggested a pillow. Intrigued, she bent to look more closely, to confirm her theory.

      A long curling hair lay upon the pillow, clearly not the gardener’s. Lifting it carefully away, she held it up to the high dusty window where a beam of light caught its shining gold. A sound behind her made her turn sharply and to frown in annoyance at the hefty figure of the gardener’s son filling the doorway. One hand was hooked over the top edge of the door. ‘Can I ’elp you, ma’am?’ he asked.

      His question, and the quiet way he asked it, made her feel as if she’d naughtily strayed out of bounds. Nor did she like being trapped in so small a place. ‘No, thank you…er…Tom, is it?’

      ‘Ted,’ he replied, not moving or looking politely away, as if he knew of her discomfort and was enjoying it. No more than twenty years old, he had already filled out with brawn, his shirt sleeves rolled up to show well-muscled sunburnt forearms, his front buttons opened too far down for any lady’s eyes to dwell there for more than a second. ‘Can I do anything for ye?’ he asked.

      Damsels being pursued and seduced by young males glowing with rude health was the stuff of her novels, and this the kind of situation not too far removed from some of the scenes in them, though so far no major part had been taken by the gardener or his son. Then, she had imagined a kind of helpless excitement rather than the raw anger she now felt at the threat of trespass by an uncouth lad. The girls and Mrs Quayle were in Richmond, shopping. Gaddy was still in her room. The gardener, Ted’s old father, was nowhere to be seen. This present danger was very far removed from the harmless entertainment of fiction where one could turn a page and return to safety.

      Still frowning, she asked, ‘Have you finished the path?’

      ‘Yes, ma’am. All done.’ His glance at the sack-covered bench lingered and returned to her, but not to her face, and she knew how he must have seen the clinging cotton of her dress revealing her figure as she bent to the glass frames.

      ‘Then I’ll find you another task to do,’ she said, suspecting that he would twist whatever she said to mean something different. ‘Where’s your father?’

      ‘Oh, we don’t need to bother about him, ma’am. He’ll not be in for a while yet. Got a task for me, ’ave you? Is that what you want, eh?’ He spoke slowly, insolently, his words taking on an intimacy far beyond their worth, his pleasant features as relaxed as his body, his blue eyes alight with anticipation.

      ‘Ted, will you move away from the door, please? I want to go out.’

      But he took his hand from the top edge, stepped further inside and began to close it, darkening the confined space. ‘No, you don’t,’ he said. ‘I know what you want. It’s what all you young lasses want.’

      Letitia’s hand groped behind her, closing over the rim of a terracotta pot. In the very moment she brought it up to hurl at Ted’s approaching head, the door re-opened with a crashing force, slamming it into the lad’s rear end as he ducked to avoid the missile.

      Like an angry bullock, he roared and turned to rush upon the intruder, but his progress was interrupted by a shining Hessian boot across his shins that sent him flying headlong into a stack of logs outside the door. The pot that Letitia had thrown shattered upon the door frame, and as she picked her way through the shards to find out who her rescuer was—supposing it to be Mr Waverley—she was in time to see the stocky Ted about to launch himself upon Lord Rayne.

      Assuming that his lordship would certainly go down like a skittle, she let out an involuntary yelp of fright for, though she had once written of a brawl between two rivals, she had never seen a blow landed. She did now, but only just, delivered with such lightning speed that Ted did not see it coming at all. She heard a sickening crack as Rayne’s fist connected with the cheek, and the grunt that followed, the thud as Ted fell back hard into the log pile where he slithered and stayed, swaying to one side.

      ‘Get up!’ Rayne snapped, standing over him.

      Ted struggled and clawed his way up, holding an arm out against the possibility of a second punisher. ‘Don’t,’he mumbled.

      ‘Get off home!’

      ‘Yessir…I wasn’t…I didn’t….honest.’

      ‘Out!’

      Slouching, clutching at his face, Ted staggered away with a sullen glance at Letitia. ‘She wanted it,’ he muttered, ‘as much as t’other one.’

      This insult was not allowed to pass any more than his first had been and, before he had taken another step, he was yanked backwards by a strong hand beneath his arm, only to be knocked sideways by a fearsome blow beneath his jaw, laying him out into a patch of feathery fennel. This time, he did not move.

      ‘Oh, you’ve killed him,’ Letitia whispered behind her hand.

      ‘If he opens his mouth once more, I will,’Rayne said, looking round for a water-butt. Taking up the full bucket of water from beneath the tap, he swung it back and discharged the contents over the prone body. Then, placing the empty bucket upon Ted’s chest, he stepped back, removed Letitia’s hand from her mouth and drew her like a parent with a child along the path to the door in the wall that led to the house garden.

      Closing the door upon the last ugly scene, he released her. ‘I’m sorry you had to see that,’ he said, ‘but unfortunately there was no choice. Are you all right?’

      She nodded. ‘Yes. Thank you for being there. I’m very much obliged to you. If I’d known he…oh, dear…it must begin to look as if I’m forever getting myself into…well, the truth is that…’

      ‘The truth is, Miss Boyce, that you do seem to attract a rather immediate kind of response; while I can understand why it happens, I find it more difficult to understand why you allow it to happen. One could, I suppose, attribute it to not being able to see clearly, but surely that cannot always be the case.’

      ‘Lord Rayne,’ she snapped, coming to an abrupt standstill on the path, ‘I do not allow any of these…these incidents to happen to me. Do you really believe that…oh…this is too much! Why should I care a fiddler’s thumb what you believe? I have thanked you for dealing with this latest incident but, if you recall, you yourself behaved just as badly, if not worse, because Mr Waverley did not arrive in time to stop you.’

      ‘Miss Boyce, Bart would not have arrived to find what I might have found just now if I’d been five minutes later. It’s fortunate that I saw him following you as I entered the garden, but my point is that you need some protection before something truly serious happens to you. Bart is all very well, but he’s not here when he’s needed, is he? Nor does he have any obligation to be.’

      ‘Why should a woman need protecting in her own garden, my lord?’

      ‘Why? Because you appear to employ untrustworthy servants. That’s why.’

      ‘I don’t employ him. He’s the gardener’s son, helping out.’

      ‘Helping himself, more like. How many others has he helped out?’

      Immediately, she remembered