The Postilion (The Masqueraders #2) - S.M. LaViolette Page 0,8
earl’s hand had been, as though he had branded her skin.
***
Jago’s fingers tingled from the sensation of the surprisingly fragile shoulder beneath his hand.
He’d known that Ben Piddock was slight, but he hadn’t counted on the delicacy of the lad’s build. Lord, how could such a slip of a person work so hard?
Jago hadn’t spoken to the younger man much since engaging him a month ago, but he had watched him often from his study, whose east-facing window looked toward the stables.
The room was one of the few in the house with such an unfashionable view. It had been part of the steward’s apartment when Jago had been a boy, back when the earldom could support such a luxury.
Day after day, Jago had seen the curly brown head bent over one task or another, setting new fenceposts and hauling away rotted sections, scampering around the slate roof of the stable as agilely as a squirrel, laboring with the vigor of three men.
Just yesterday he had watched Ben move an ancient trough toward the stables in painstaking degrees, using the old guard mule, Hector, a crotchety animal that nipped and kicked and fought Ben every step of the way.
Jago liked to think that if his mind hadn’t been consumed with the disastrous estate he had inherited that he would have thought to hire help for Ben weeks ago, even though he could scarcely afford it.
His lips quirked as he recalled the boy’s startled face when he’d asked him to come up to play chess. He’d looked poleaxed: as if Jago had asked him to sprint to Redruth naked.
Jago paused; something about Ben’s startled expression had made him seem so familiar. It wasn’t the first time he’d had the impression that he’d seen the lad before; the feeling seemed to get stronger, even though he got no closer to placing his face.
He shrugged off the nagging thought.
As for asking Ben to play chess? Well, he supposed it was strange behavior for an earl—playing a game with his servant—but it was the sort of thing he’d done whenever he pleased for the past eighteen years.
Jago found games a far more enjoyable pastime than dinner parties and vapid chatter—two activities he would need to reconcile himself to now that he would soon be reentering society.
But just because he’d had this new life foisted on him did not mean he had to give up on the old one, entirely. He could bloody well play chess with his stable master if he pleased; he would be damned if he gave up all the things he enjoyed just because he was now the head of an impoverished, crumbling earldom.
Speaking of that … Jago surveyed the piles of documents, papers, and ledgers scattered across his desk.
The Earls of Trebolton had always occupied the library in the past. But when Jago had returned to Lenshurst Park he’d discovered that the once-grand book room had been pillaged of furniture, drapes, artwork, and a great many of its books.
It had been far too dismal an atmosphere to work in, so he’d had his brother’s massive mahogany desk and chair, as well as a large trestle table, moved into this all but empty room.
This hadn’t been the only empty room at Lenshurst Park; there were dozens of others—mostly bedchambers—in the hundred and thirty room house, all stripped of their contents.
Jago saw that he’d unconsciously clenched his hands—an outward sign of the tension he felt whenever he thought about his family seat these days—and flexed his fingers on the carved arms of the massive chair.
It was a chair that he’d never thought he’d occupy. In Jago’s mind this chair—this house, and everything in it—had belonged to his brother. Even now, almost a year after Cadan’s death, it was still difficult to believe this was all his.
But Cadan was long buried; his older brother, his hero for the first eighteen years of his life, and a stranger for the next eighteen—dead.
When Jago had learned about his brother’s death he’d come home to Lenshurst Park for the first time in eighteen years. He had remained for almost a month after the funeral, but he’d needed to return to his medical practice in the village of Trentham.
His brother’s widow, Claire, had begged him not to go back to Trentham. “It is such a mess here, Jago, and the girls—well, they’ve grown wild and I can’t make them mind me. And the house is just so—” She had begun crying at that point.