The Rusticated Duchess Read Online Free Page B

But without a doubt, her words as she’d stepped aside had been the most clear. She was giving them permission to pass, not moving aside for their convenience.
    Clare frowned and flipped open Seton’s saddlebag, dragging out the spyglass he knew resided there. “I’m going up. Find out what you can from the men, I want to know who she is, and where she came from.”
    He didn’t bother to glance back at Seton’s astonished expression as he strode towards the inner wall and up the stone path to the great doors of the keep. The butler was already throwing open the doors, but Clare barely nodded. He was focused on the keep’s battlements.
    The truth was that he had to know where she was trudging. If she was far enough away that the spyglass lost her—though that seemed terribly unlikely—he’d simply take his horse and head off in her direction. He had to know. The desire burned in him, illogical and unexplained, but very real. It vaulted him up the main stairs, then up the old stone stairs past the tower rooms, and finally onto the stone landing with its small guardroom at the highest point of the central tower in the keep.
    He pushed aside the door to the castellated battlement. This part of the castle was reserved for family only now, and the tower had no real value as a military installation, but it was still the tallest point other than the lighthouse and the watchtower that marked the harbour entrance.
    Leaning against the stone, he glanced about idly, noted Seton climbing to the watchtower and lifted the spyglass.
    She was there, on the Shore Road. The man with her now kept doggedly to her side, though at a respectful distance. She walked confidently, without pausing, as if she was accustomed to the chilly weather and the wind and the glorious view. Clare pondered her for a minute, disturbed by his reaction to the hooded young woman in black. He could hardly claim to have even seen her, with nothing but her fine facial features revealed, but those lines were already alive at the back of his brain.
    It had been longer than twelve years since he’d even seen a lady as more than a distraction. Why now?
    The question was one Clare had no desire to ponder, especially when she confidently walked up to the gate that surrounded Blessing Cottage. His mouth opened in surprise, then he slammed it shut when someone from within promptly opened the gate and she walked through, leaving her guard to chat with the waiting servant. Without pause, she marched up to the door, which opened for her from within, and she bundled through it, out of his sight.
    Blessing Cottage ?
    The house was supposed to be in his family, had been in his family for generations. There it sat, within sight of the castle walls. In the long distant past, some ancestor had built it for a mistress, who had lived in it with her children. In times more recent, younger sons had inhabited it with their families. Clare’s great-grandfather, however, burdened by failing fortunes and struggling to pinch two pennies together, was unable to bequeath his second son a reasonable portion. Instead, the old man had deeded Blessing Cottage to that second son. Clare’s great-aunt and great-uncle had lived there when Clare was but a boy, but after their deaths the property had passed to their son—his father’s cousin—who had never returned to inhabit it. That Blessing had been a military man, and Clare knew that Colonel Blessing had died unmarried and was buried in the castle’s family graveyard.
    The property had not, Clare knew, reverted to the family. Neither had it been inhabited in the twenty-some years since Colonel Blessing’s death.
    Fifty years earlier the Blessing family might have been in dire circumstances, but Clare’s father had been almost fanatical while guarding their remaining assets. Clare, for nearly twenty years, had then worked diligently with his father to reclaim the lost legacy the family had once enjoyed. He wouldn’t describe the Duke of