by Mary Balogh
“I agree with you, Anna, much as I wish I did not,” said the Dowager Countess of Riverdale, her grandmother and matriarch of the family. “Harry is very like his grandfather in that way. It is pride more than stubbornness in his case, however.”
“I do know that, Grandmama,” Anna said. “Unfortunately, pride and stubbornness have the same symptoms. Sometimes I could cheerfully shake him.”
“What we need, then,” Matilda said briskly as the committee showed signs of sinking into despondency, “is a plan B to fall back upon if plan A cannot be made to work. What are we going to do if Harry cannot be persuaded to come to London? The answer is obvious in one sense, of course. We will have to go to him. But it would all need very careful organizing. We are going to have to make two complete sets of plans, in fact, since we will not have the luxury of sitting together like this after we all return home next week.”
“Viola will surely wish to be involved,” Wren, Alexander’s wife and the Countess of Riverdale, said. “She is worried about Harry too. She is his mother, after all. So are Camille and Abigail, I expect. And Viola is more familiar with Mrs. Sullivan than we are.”
“The housekeeper at Hinsford Manor?” Mildred said. “Yes, she will certainly need to know our plan B. We do not want to give the poor woman an apoplexy by turning up on Harry’s doorstep en masse and unannounced.”
“But Harry must not know,” Jessica said. “If he even suspects what may be in store for him, we will arrive to find that he has already left on a six-month walking tour of the Scottish highlands.”
“Poor Harry,” Elizabeth said, laughing.
“Right,” Matilda said, drawing paper and ink toward her and testing the nib of a quill pen. “Plan A first. London. Grand party. Archer House.” She wrote the words down and looked up, pen poised, for details to add.
Harry Westcott, all unbeknownst to him, was about to fall victim to the loving determination of his female relatives to see to it that he enjoyed his thirtieth birthday as he had never enjoyed any birthday before it, and that during those happy celebrations he met enough eligible females that he could not help but fall in love with one of them and proceed to make his offer and set his wedding date. He was going to find his happily-ever-after whether he knew he wanted it or not.
The only faint ray of hope for him, Colin, Elizabeth’s husband, observed to a group of men who had retreated to the billiard room one afternoon, was that the Westcott women did not actually have a stellar record as matchmakers.
“Most of us have ended up in marriages of our own choosing via weddings of our own fashioning despite rather than because of their efforts,” he said fondly.
“Quite so,” Avery agreed as he chalked the end of his cue and surveyed the mess of balls on the table with a keen eye. “But our women can be formidable when they grab hold of a cause. On the whole it is wiser—and ultimately quite harmless—to hold one’s peace while they scheme and plan and think they have the world and its turning under their control.”
* * *
* * *
Harry meanwhile spent Christmas at the big house in the hills above Bath where his elder sister, Camille, lived with Joel Cunningham, her husband, and their large family. He enjoyed their company and that of all the rest of his family on his mother’s side—it included Mrs. Kingsley, his maternal grandmother, and the Reverend Michael Kingsley, his mother’s brother, with his wife, Mary.
Truth to tell, Harry was glad of an excuse not to spend any part of Christmas at Brambledean with the Westcott side of the family. It was not that he was not fond of them all. He was. It was more that their obvious concern for him always made him decidedly uncomfortable. The guilt of what his father had done was something they had taken upon their own shoulders, especially his grandmother and the aunts, his father’s sisters—Matilda, Louise, and Mildred. They felt somehow responsible for seeing to it that all turned out well for Harry, their brother’s only son. They worried about him. He always felt compelled to be openly jolly in their company. But he could not live happily ever after just to please them. Contentedly ever after was not good enough for them, it seemed.
It was quite good enough for him.
He had lived alone at Hinsford Manor for four years now, at first recovering his health and strength—a frustratingly slow process—and then settling in to a life of quiet contentment as a country gentleman with a large home and farms to oversee and neighbors with whom to socialize. He really was quite contented there even though there were people, most notably his family, who could not believe it of a man who was still in his twenties. If restlessness crept in under his guard now and then, he simply ignored it until it went away, for he could think of no other way of life that would suit him better or even as well.
He enjoyed Christmas even more than he had expected to, considering the fact that it was busy and noisy with so many children. Abby and Gil had a new baby since last year, and Camille and Joel’s family had expanded during the past summer to include the twin baby girls they had adopted because no one else would take them together.
Only three of their children were their own. The other six were adopted. It was a distinction that blurred into insignificance within the family, however. They were all equally Camille and Joel’s children.
It ought to have been an impossibly chaotic Christmas. And in a sense it was, since Camille and Joel ran a rather informal household in which the children were rarely confined to the nursery with their nurse unless they were eating or sleeping or at their lessons—which they were not over the holiday. It did not help that both twin babies were teething and being a bit cross about it, or that Abby and Gil’s Ben had recently learned to crawl and used his new mobility to disappear from everyone’s sight and cause mass panic while he embarked upon unceasing explorations of his world, especially dark corners and narrow gaps between furniture. And the two dogs of the family were irrepressibly excited by the arrival of a third, Beauty, Gil’s great lump of a canine, and chased and followed her wherever she went—when various children were not hanging all over her instead, that was, or sleeping with their heads pillowed on her back.
But it was also an unexpectedly good time for all of them, Harry included. An unencumbered uncle was communal property, he soon discovered, to be climbed upon without a by-your-leave and talked at and quarreled over and slept upon and, once, vomited over. He enjoyed himself so much, in fact, that he stayed to see in the New Year and then, in the middle of January, went to Gloucestershire with Abby and Gil and stayed with them a month.
He had not been away from Hinsford for so long at a stretch since before his return there from Paris. He would not have thought it possible. He would have expected to feel some panic. But he stayed away by choice and enjoyed every moment. Well, perhaps not the vomit moment.
When he set about analyzing what it was about this Christmas that had so warmed his heart, he realized that it was mainly the evidence all about him that life had worked out well for his mother and sisters. One could not know, of course, how it would have turned out for them if the Great Disaster had not happened. But Harry found it difficult to imagine that they would all be as happy as they actually were.
It was a strange realization. Did disasters sometimes happen to turn one away from a wrong course into the right one, the one that would bring the most happiness and the greatest fulfillment? Were some catastrophes not really catastrophic at all when one could look back and see the whole picture?
His mother had married Marcel a few years ago and seemed younger now than Harry could ever recall her being. He remembered her as a quiet lady of unshakable dignity and marble demeanor. Life with his father, he had realized even at the time, could not have been easy, though she had certainly been unaware that it was not a legal marriage. Now she was warm, vibrant, ready with smiles for everyone and open arms for her many grandchildren—and she was never far away from Marcel, who did nothing much to hide the fact that he
adored her.
Camille had been the biggest surprise. She had been a stern, rather sour young woman—or so she had appeared to her younger brother—always very moral and upright and judgmental, and she had been betrothed to a viscount who was very much like her. Happiness and Camille could never realistically be mentioned in the same breath back in those days. Now she was vigorous and cheerful, always slightly disheveled though never downright untidy, almost always with a small child balanced on one hip or a baby, sometimes two, cradled in her arms while other children hung about her, tugging at her skirt for attention or simply enjoying being close to her. Joel, though he led a busy life as a portrait artist of growing renown and as a teacher in the orphanage school where both he and Anna had grown up and where he had met Camille, usually had a child on his lap too or perched on an arm of his chair or hovering about his easel when he painted, as likely as not washing out brushes for him that did not need washing. Yet they enjoyed an unusually close personal relationship too, those two. Not that Harry was ever able to observe them in their private apartments, of course. Heaven forbid! The happiness they shared was obvious anyway. And when had Camille become beautiful, even to a brother’s eyes?
And then there was Abby, who had been about to make her debut into society when the ghastly discovery was made. She had been looking forward to a Season in London, with its dizzying number of balls and other entertainments and the prospect of meeting an array of eligible gentlemen and making a brilliant marriage. She had fled to Bath instead to live with their grandmother and had been sweet and quiet and placid and apparently resigned to her lot in life for several years after. But then, after Gil had helped bring Harry home to England and stayed with him at Hinsford for a while, the two of them had met and married. Not for love, it might be added. Gil had needed a wife so that he could persuade a judge to return his young daughter to him from his late wife’s parents, who considered him an unfit father. It had not taken long for the marriage to turn into a love match, however. They lived now in a modest manor within a big idyllic garden close to an equally idyllic village. Gil farmed and Abby tended her garden and visited her friends and involved herself in village affairs and looked after the three children. Their happiness with each other was a palpable thing.
Harry was head of his immediate family, for what that was worth now that he was no longer head of the whole Westcott family. He had suffered after the Great Disaster as much on behalf of his mother and sisters as on his own account. He had felt so very helpless to shield them from the pain and the ruin and the bleak prospects the future had seemed to offer. He had been a mere twenty years old, for the love of God.
He need worry about them no longer. Life had been very good to all three of them.
They worried about him, though.
His mother took him aside a couple of days after Christmas, having invited him to take coffee with her in the small sitting room attached to her bedchamber. Marcel was downstairs somewhere, probably putting into practice some of the ingenious hand signals seventeen-year-old Winifred, Camille and Joel’s eldest daughter, had devised to communicate with Andrew, who was deaf and mute and liked to follow his grandpapa everywhere.
Harry knew he had become the despair of his whole family because they no longer understood him. They worried because they feared he was turning into a hermit, though in fact he was not, and because they were still not convinced he had fully recovered from his war wounds. He had, though he still grappled with nightmares and no doubt always would. They worried because he was approaching his thirtieth birthday yet showed no apparent interest in settling down. Good Lord, how much further down could he settle?
“I love my grandchildren so much my heart sometimes seems fit to burst,” his mother said as she set down his cup before him. “But occasionally, for sheer sanity’s sake, I need to withdraw to a quiet room and shut the door behind me. I do not know how Camille and Joel do it. Or Abigail and Gil, for that matter. I daresay that is why parenting is done by young people.”
“If I had been asked ten years ago what would be the perfect life for Cam,” he said, “I would never, given a million tries, have described this one. It suits her to perfection, though, does it not?”
“It does,” she agreed. “And Abigail. I was so very worried when she married Gil without a word to any of us except you. It seemed impossible to me that she could ever be happy with him. Sometimes I simply love being proved wrong.”
“Gil is a good man,” he said. Gil had grown up in the gutter, to quote his own words, the bastard son of a village washerwoman and Viscount Dirkson, who was allowed no part in his upbringing and who was now connected to the Westcott family through his marriage to Harry’s aunt Matilda Westcott a few years ago—but that was another story. Gil had risen through the ranks in the army until he jumped the almost insurmountable barrier to officer status, courtesy of his father after his mother’s death. He had ended up as a lieutenant colonel, one rank superior to Harry’s. “I knew he and Abby loved each other, Mama, when I encouraged them to marry, though they did not yet know it themselves.”
She took a sip of her coffee, set down her cup, and sighed audibly. “And then there is you, Harry.”
He answered her merely with an interrogative lifting of his eyebrows. Here we go, he thought.
“It hurts my heart to see you forever placid and cheerful,” she continued. “Will I never get my boy back? I begin to despair of it. When will I see you eager and vibrant and exuberant again and enjoying life to the full?”
He thought he had been eager and vibrant and all the rest of it, besieged by nephews and nieces and dogs as he had been for the past week, and actually enjoying himself without having to be deliberately jolly.
“If you are referring to the time before the Great Disaster, Mama,” he said, “then I would remind you that I really was just a boy then. I was twenty. Do you truly want to see me conducting myself with bouncing high spirits, spouting superlatives and hyperbole with every utterance? I hope I have grown up a bit since those days. I am contented with my life as it is.”
She shook her head, obviously unconvinced, and regarded him for a while with a disconcertingly steady gaze. “But I want to see you happy, Harry,” she protested.
He grinned despite himself as a shriek of childish laughter and an excited woofing wafted in from somewhere beyond the shut door. “With a wife and six children, I suppose,” he said.
“I am not sure about six,” she protested, grimacing and then chuckling. “But yes, I would love to see you with a woman who can make you happy. With a woman whom you can make happy. With someone or something to make your life . . . oh, vivid. Do not shake your head like that, Harry, and don that amused, knowing expression. Love, happiness, vividness of life, do exist, and I am proof of it. I am living all my dearest dreams with Marcel.”
His smile softened as he looked back at her. “Yes, I know, Mama,” he said. “And I could not be happier about it.”
“Harry.” She leaned forward and took one of his hands in both of her own. “I want to see you happy with someone you . . . Oh, with someone you can cherish.”
He cringed inwardly though he did not stop smiling. “Time to change the subject,” he said, turning his hand to squeeze one of hers before taking up his cup again, draining his coffee, and getting to his feet. “Better yet, it is time to take myself off. I seem to remember challenging Robbie to a game of billiards this morning. He will accuse me of cowardice if I fail to show up.” Robbie was Camille and Joel’s eleven-year-old.
“Forgive me, Harry.” His mother got to her feet too and hugged him warmly. “Your life is yours to live your way, as Marcel is forever reminding me when I worry about you. Let us go and enjoy the rest of Christmas.”
Which they did.
Two
Much as he had enjoyed Christmas in Bath and the month in Gloucestershire, Harry was very happy to return home in February with signs of early
spring all around him in the form of greening grass and budding trees and catkins and snowdrops, primroses and crocuses. For the past week or so he had begun to crave his own home and the quiet serenity of his life there.
For the ensuing week he enjoyed his aloneness, though admittedly it was not complete solitude. He spent time on the home farm, delighting particularly in watching the new lambs frolic on spindly legs about their mothers. And his two particular friends, Lawrence Hill, son of Sir Maynard Hill, a neighbor whose land adjoined Hinsford, and Tom Corning, the village schoolmaster, each came and spent time with him. Both were friends he had had since boyhood. Lawrence brought an invitation from his mother to take his potluck with them for dinner. Tom invited him to an evening of cards with some neighbors that his wife was organizing. Harry was soon feeling that he would never want to leave again, in fact. This was where he belonged and where he was most contented.
Except . . .
Well. Dash it all. Annoyingly, he appeared to have brought a certain restlessness home with him, and it could not be as easily ignored as it always had been. He kept thinking—with great satisfaction, it might be added—about how happy his mother was. And how happy Camille and Abigail were. They had each found what Harry considered among the rarest and most precious of graces: love and companionship with the men they had married. But then his thoughts would shift to himself. Would there ever be someone like that for him? That one woman in the whole wide world made just for him? How had his mother phrased it?