“A little. But Mr. Finchley told me it was nothing more than ignorant superstition.”
“Quite so. However, in this part of the world, Miss Reynolds, you’ll find ignorance is in ready supply.”
Helena was unconcerned. “I should like to see the Abbey for myself.”
“Yes, yes. All in good time.”
“And I should like to meet Mr. Thornhill.”
“Undoubtedly.” Mr. Boothroyd shuffled through his papers again. To her surprise, a rising color crept into the elderly man’s face. “There are just one or two more points at issue, Miss Reynolds.” He cleared his throat. “You’re aware, I presume… That is, I do hope Mr. Finchley explained…this marriage is to be a real marriage in every sense of the word.”
She looked at him, brows knit in confusion. “What other kind of marriage would it be?”
“And you’re agreeable?”
“Of course.”
He made no attempt to disguise his skepticism. “There are many ladies who would find such an arrangement singularly lacking in romance.”
Helena didn’t doubt it. She’d have balked at the prospect herself once. But much had changed in the past year—and in the past months, especially. Any girlish fantasies she’d harbored about true love were dead. In their place was a rather ruthless pragmatism.
“I don’t seek romance, Mr. Boothroyd. Only kindness. And Mr. Finchley said that Mr. Thornhill was a kind man.”
Mr. Boothroyd appeared to be surprised by this. “Did he indeed,” he murmured. “What else did he tell you, pray?”
She hesitated before repeating the words that Mr. Finchley had spoken. Words that had convinced her once and for all to travel to a remote coastal town in Devon, to meet and marry a complete stranger. “He told me that Mr. Thornhill had been a soldier, and that he knew how to keep a woman safe.”
Justin Thornhill cast another brooding glance at the pale, dark-haired beauty sitting across from Boothroyd. She was slight but shapely, her modest traveling gown doing nothing to disguise the high curve of her breasts and the narrow lines of her small waist. When first he’d seen her in the taproom, he thought she was a fashionable traveler on her way to Abbot’s Holcombe, the resort town farther up the coast. He had no reason to think otherwise. The Miss Reynolds he’d been expecting—the plain, sensible spinster who’d responded to his matrimonial advertisement—had never arrived.
This Miss Reynolds was a different class of woman altogether.
She sat across from Boothroyd, her back ramrod straight, and her elegant, gloved hands folded neatly on her lap in a pretty attitude. She regarded the curmudgeonly steward with wide, doelike hazel eyes and when she spoke, she did so in the smooth, cultured tones of a gentlewoman. No, Justin amended. Not a gentlewoman. A lady.
She was nothing like the two sturdy widows Boothroyd had interviewed earlier for the position of housekeeper. Those women had, ironically, been more in line with Justin’s original specifications—the specifications he had barked at his aging steward those many months ago when Boothroyd had first broached the idea of his advertising for a wife.
“I have no interest in courtship,” he’d said, “nor in weeping young ladies who take to their bed with megrims. What I need is a woman. A woman who is bound by law and duty to see to the running of this godforsaken mausoleum. A woman I can bed on occasion. Damnation, Boothroyd, I didn’t survive six years in India so I could live like a bloody monk when I returned home.”
They were words spoken in frustration after the last in a long line of housekeepers had quit without notice. Words that owed a great deal to physical loneliness and far too many glasses of strong spirits.
The literal-minded Boothroyd had taken them as his marching orders.
The next morning, before Justin had even arisen from his alcohol-induced slumber, his ever-efficient steward had arranged for an advertisement to be placed in the London papers. It had been brief and to the point:
MATRIMONY: Retired army officer, thirty-two, of moderate means and quiet disposition wishes to marry a spinster or widow of the same age. Suitable lady will be sensible, compassionate, and capable of managing the household of remote country property. Independent fortune unimportant. Letters to be addressed, postpaid, to Mr. T. Finchley, Esq., Fleet Street.
Justin had initially been angry. He’d even threatened to give Boothroyd the sack. However, within a few days he’d found himself warming to the idea of acquiring a wife by advertisement. It was modern and efficient. As straightforward as any other business transaction. The prospective candidates would simply write to