The Rake. Mary Jo Putney

five minutes to brush out.

      “Heaven help any dog that encounters Attila.” Smiling, Merry handed over a thick mug of steaming coffee. “Here, Lady Alys, just the way you like it. Lots of cream and sugar.”

      Wrapping her long fingers around the mug, Alys shoved the pillows up behind her and subsided against them as she took a grateful swig of coffee. “Ah-h-h . . .” she sighed as the hot liquid began to restore life to her component body parts. Her brain clearing, she asked, “Why did I want to get up this hour?”

      Merry grinned, looking much less like a porcelain doll. “The planting begins today, and you charged me to be sure that you rose early.”

      “So I did.” Alys gulped more coffee. “Thank you for waking me. Maybe I’ll keep you after all.”

      Unabashed, Merry retorted, “You have to keep me, remember? You voluntarily agreed to take on me and the boys, and now you’re stuck with us. At least until you find some demented male who will take me off your hands.”

      Alys laughed, a sure sign that the coffee was restoring her natural good temper. “All the males who cluster around you are surely demented, but it’s always from unrequited love. My only problem is keeping them at a safe distance.”

      She gazed fondly at Merry. Her ward had the kind of petite blond beauty that Alys would have killed for when she was a girl. It would be easy to hate Merry if she weren’t such a thoroughly nice person. The girl was also intelligent and had a worldly wisdom that was downright frightening in a young lady of a mere nineteen summers. She occupied a niche in Alys’s life that partook equally of daughter and best friend, though sometimes it was hard to tell who was raising whom.

      Since her guardian was showing signs of life, Merry said, “One of the farm lads left a note for you. It was addressed to Lady Alice, A-l-i-c-e, of course.”

      “It’s too early in the day to apologize for how my name is spelled.” Alys yawned again. “Besides, if they did know how to spell it correctly, they would probably pronounce it wrong, What did the note say?”

      “Something about chickens.”

      “That would be Barlow. I’ll stop by his place today.” Alys finished the coffee, then swung her long legs over the side of the bed and fumbled for her slippers. “It’s safe to leave now, I won’t fall asleep again. Take that imbecile cat with you and feed him.”

      Merry chuckled and leaned over to scoop the giant long-haired tomcat into her arms. Attila was a substantial armful, a crazy quilt of stripes and white splotches. His regal expression made it hard to remember the straggly, starving kitten Alys had pulled drowning from a stream. These days he assumed that rulership was his natural due, and peasants who didn’t provide his breakfast were beneath contempt. He yowled accusingly as Merry carried him from the bedroom.

      Alys’s head sank onto her hands as she sat on the edge of the bed, her good humor fading under the lingering depression of the nightmare. After a moment she sighed and got to her feet, pulled on her worn red robe, and went to sit at the dressing table. As she combed her fingers through her hair to loosen snarls, she stared at her reflection and dispassionately catalogued her appearance in the way that she had learned was the best antidote to the dream.

      Though she wasn’t the sort of woman a man would desire, at least she wasn’t really ugly. Her complexion was too tan for fashion, but her features were regular and might have been called handsome if she were a man. It was just that her face, like the rest of her, was too large. She stood five feet nine and a half inches in her stockings, and was as tall or taller than most of the men at Strickland.

      Having undone the snarls, she began brushing out her hair. Back in the days when a fortune had endowed her with spurious desirability, her heavy tresses had been called chestnut. Now that she worked for a living, it was merely brown, a color of no particular distinction. Still, Alys privately thought her hair was her best feature. It had grown back even longer and thicker after the time she had furiously chopped it off, and it gleamed with auburn and gold highlights. But it was basically just brown hair.

      Parting it straight down the center of her head, she started on the first of two braids. After finishing them, she wrapped both about her head in a prim coronet. In the early morning sun, her most bizarre feature was clearly visible; her right eye being gray-green while her left was a warm brown. Alys had never met anyone else with this particular trait. It seemed unfair to be both odd-eyed and freakishly tall.

      The thought produced a slight smile, thereby displaying her other regrettable feature. Usually she forgot the idiotic dimples that appeared when she smiled or laughed, but seeing herself in the mirror reminded her how utterly incongruous they looked on a great horse like her. Doll-like, golden Merry was the one who should have had dimples, but perversely, she didn’t. Life was definitely not fair. If Alys could have given her dimples to her ward, she would have done so with great delight.

      Scowling eliminated the dimples, so Alys scowled. Her dark, slashing eyebrows were fearsome even when she was smiling, and made her scowl truly intimidating.

      Then she turned from the mirror, having completed the ritual of assuring herself that she didn’t look as dreadful as the nightmare always made her feel. A pity that today she must supervise the planting and would wear pantaloons, linen shirt, and a man’s coat. Her usual dark dresses were better at restraining the excesses of her figure, but the male clothing required by some of her work made it all too obvious that she had a normal assortment of feminine curves. Given her ridiculous size, the effect was somewhat overpowering. Not that all men were repelled. She had seen enough sidelong glances to guess that some were curious about what it would be like to bed a Long Meg. They would never find out from her.

      Jamming her shapeless black hat onto her head, Alys Weston, called Lady Alys to her face and other things behind her back, thirty-year-old spinster of the parish and highly successful steward of the estate known as Strickland in the county of Dorset, stamped down the steps to begin supervising a long day of work in the fields.

      The day turned out to be even more tiring than anticipated. The new seed drill Alys had bought was temperamental, to the unconcealed delight of the laborers who were only too willing to say that the fool contraption would never work. Having considerable aptitude for mechanical things, Alys got the device to perform after an hour of crawling around underneath it on the damp earth.

      She spent the rest of the day covered with dirt, too busy even to stop for lunch. Merry, bless her, had sent Dorset blue vinny cheese, ale, and the local hard rolls called knobs, which Alys ate while riding to the sheep pasture to check on the health of some lambs that had been sickly.

      By the end of the day, the scoffers were reluctantly conceding that the seed drill was effective. They liked it even less now that it worked. Alys was hard-pressed to keep her tongue between her teeth. It had been a continuing battle to get these taciturn males to accept her orders, and even after four years of proof that her modern methods worked, every new idea was a battle. Damn them all anyhow! she swore as she rode home, the spring sun setting and a sharp chill in the air. There wasn’t another estate in Dorset as productive, nor another landowner or steward that provided for displaced workers the way she did.

      Sometimes she wondered why she bothered.

      When she returned to the steward’s house, Rose Hall, Merry was embroidering demurely in the parlor and the boys had not yet returned from school. Alys took a quick bath and changed to a dark blue wool dress. Then she joined her ward for a glass of sherry and a quick glance through the post. As Merry laughed at the misadventures with the seed drill, Alys came across a letter franked by her employer, the Earl of Wargrave.

      Frowning, she slit the wafer and opened the letter. Most of her communications were with the estate lawyer, Chelmsford, rather than the earl. She had never met either of them, of course. If one of those respectable gentlemen learned that the steward was female, she would surely lose her situation.

      The old earl had never left his principal seat in Gloucestershire, but the new one was young, active, and conscientious. She worried that someday he might turn up unexpectedly. Luckily, on his one visit to Strickland,