The Revenge of Captain Paine Read Online Free PDF Page B

skin was the smoothest he had ever seen and her cheekbones were prominent and finely crafted. Under her nightshirt, he could just about see a birthmark in the shape of a strawberry above her breast, and her silky chestnut hair fell around her face on the pillow. But as beautiful as she still was, it wasn’t her looks he had fallen in love with. As the only child of a deceased aristocrat who claimed lineage as far back as Tudor times, she had inherited none of her father’s traits: his cruelty, meanness, vanity and greed. Perhaps because she’d learnt to despise him from a young age, she’d wilfully set out to create a different life for herself and had succeeded in doing so, beyond her wildest imagination. Pyke could say that, without any doubt, she was the kindest, most intelligent woman he’d ever known. This didn’t mean she was incapable of selfishness but rather that hers was a morality where the ends always justified the means. Having conspired with Pyke to see off her father, she’d used the income accrued from his estate to fund the charitable causes that she had devoted her life to supporting.
    The previous night, after he had returned from Cranborne Park and they had eaten supper, he’d given her further instruction about how to load and fire a pistol. On the lawn, with only the light produced by the candles in the dining room to guide her, Emily had hit a tin sconce from twenty paces. Later, he had carried her upstairs to the bedroom and now he noticed that his fingers still smelled of powder and sex.
    Quietly, Pyke left Emily sleeping and returned to his bedroom, where one of the housemaids had lit a fire and Royce, his valet and butler, had prepared his washstand and filled the basin with hot water. His razor and soap rested on a shelf above the basin and, in the corner of the room, a copper hip bath had also been filled with steaming hot water. Stirred by his presence, Royce appeared at the door and Pyke dismissed him with a few words of gratitude.
    Like all of the servants, Royce hated him. They hated him because one of his first acts as the new master had been to cut the household staff in half; hated him because he didn’t believe in tradition, because he’d closed down the old brew- and bakehouses and ordered the household bread and beer from suppliers in Edmonton; hated him because he wasn’t Emily’s father and didn’t come from aristocratic lineage, because he came from the same stock as they did and because he knew their tricks, knew they fiddled the books to make a little extra for themselves. A few pennies here and a few pennies there, Royce and the housekeeper between them. They hated him and he despised them; despised them for mourning a petty tyrant like Emily’s father, despised them for their small-mindedness and arcane country ways.
    If Pyke had had his way, he would have closed down the hall and moved into the city, and they knew this - they had perhaps overheard his many arguments with Emily on the subject. Most of all they hated him because they feared him, feared that he would some day put an end to the only life they had ever known, a life that, under Emily’s father, must have seemed so secure.
    Before breakfast, Pyke found Royce sitting at his table in the butler’s pantry and he spent half an hour going through the invoices. The expense of maintaining and running the hall never ceased to amaze him, and while the rents received from the tenant farmers just about covered the costs, more so now the costs had been scaled back, and left a little in reserve which Emily used as she saw fit (this had been one of the stipulations of the wedding contract), Pyke always baulked at the idea of spending so much money on things he barely noticed and didn’t care about: veterinary bills, repairs to cracked windowpanes and chipped stone floors, the installation of new sashes, the replacement of old mattresses and rebinding of old books, payments to chimney sweeps, vermin removers,