Ravishing in Red by Madeline Hunter Page A

finally dulled by melancholy. He pictured her walking through the inn to the coach, pretending not to notice how the other patrons stared and whispered.
    He told his valet to call for his horse.

Chapter Five
    C umberworth remained a country village, but London moved closer every year. It had already been absorbed into the environs of the city, one of many small Middlesex hamlets that saw newcomers mix with old residents, and land developers carve farms into small estates for the prosperous families of its larger neighbor.
    Sebastian’s arrival therefore did not raise much notice. He rode down the main lane, past shops in old, half-timbered buildings and stone homes lined shoulder to shoulder. He looked for a tavern.
    The Baron’s Board was not busy at two o’clock, and Sebastian received his ale quickly. He stood while he drank, and submitted to the proprietor’s curious inspection.
    “Weather this damp in town?” the man asked while he wiped some pint mugs.
    “Worse,” Sebastian said.
    “You be on your way to someplace drier?”
    “No, I came here looking for someone on a matter of business. Perhaps you know her. Miss Kelmsleigh.”
    The proprietor chuckled. “I know her, and her friends. Everyone in Cumberworth knows Mrs. Joyes’s houseguests.”
    “Do they now? I believe Miss Kelmsleigh is a cousin, not a houseguest.”
    “Hard to know what to call those women, now isn’t it? The rest aren’t relatives, I don’t think. Just a collection of females who came to visit and never left.”
    “Does Mrs. Joyes live in the village?”
    “She has property outside of it a short ways. Nice house and a good bit of land. She grows flowers there in a big conservatory. She sells them in London to fancy flower shops. Her house is back off the road some, so right where you have to turn off, she has a painted sign. The Rarest Blooms, she calls her trade.” He chuckled again. “Nice enough women. Keep to themselves mostly. No reason to think anything disreputable is about them, but people will talk, won’t they?”
    Undoubtedly. Sebastian finished his ale and asked for directions to this sign of The Rarest Blooms.
    Fifteen minutes later he turned down the private lane that took him to Mrs. Joyes’s house.
    It was the sort of good, solid home that could be found all over England. Handsome in its smoothly dressed gray stone, it was too big to be called a cottage and too small to be called a manor. It rose two levels high beneath its steeply pitched attics, with only carefully proportioned windows decorating its plain facade.
    No groom appeared to take his horse, so Sebastian tied the reins to a post. The time he waited after his knock on the door suggested that few servants worked here, despite the way the property insinuated good fortune.
    Eventually the door opened. A very thin housekeeper of middling years peered at him from beneath her cap’s ruffle. She read his card and peered again. Her gaze lingered on the oblong wooden box under his arm.
    “I am told that Miss Kelmsleigh lives here,” he said. “I have come to return something that she lost.”
    A pretty blond girl stepped into view. She also read the card. “I will take care of this, Mrs. Hill.”
    The older woman slipped away. The blond girl bid him to enter. “You should speak with Mrs. Joyes,” she said. “She owns this house. She is in the greenhouse. I will take you to her.”
    She ambled off, leading him to the back of the house. They passed a library with handsome cases and many upholstered chairs. A second sitting room occupied the rear of the house. He could see a conservatory through one of its windows.
    Situated twenty yards behind the house, the conservatory was much larger than the ones normally found at country homes unless they were very large estates. Glass formed the upper half of all the walls in a mosaic of rectangular panes held together with iron.
    Entry to the conservatory came at the end of a corridor that gave off from the sitting