by Mary Balogh
To chop wood for her, for the love of God.
In return for a red or yellow scarf or some other color that was not black or gray or staid. Or pink.
Six
Lydia was in the kitchen, baking ginger biscuits and hovering over the oven more than was necessary. She was also glancing through the window more than she ought, though she did stand a little to one side as she did so, half hidden behind the curtain, so she would not be spotted. Not that he was ever looking her way. He was too busy.
Major Harry Westcott was chopping wood. Really quite a vast pile of it. Not just a one-day supply, which was all she could seem to achieve for herself before running out of energy, but enough to last her a week at the very least. And he was showing no sign of being finished yet.
Lydia had tried to persuade herself that he would not come. So she would not be disappointed if he did not, perhaps? She had also tried to persuade herself that she did not want him to come. Last evening ought to have convinced her beyond any doubt that the whole idea of having an affair with him, or with anyone else, was out of the question, not to mention outrageous. She could not remember ever spending a more uncomfortable hour than the one she had spent seated beside him in her living room. Especially—oh goodness—when he had covered her hand with his own and then actually curled his fingers about it. And when he had kissed her fingers and then her cheek as he was leaving.
He was too much—vastly too much—for her to handle, she had thought as she had peeped about her curtain and watched him walk away, his lantern swaying from one raised hand. It would be like trying to contain a hurricane or a tornado.
Oh no, she had not wanted him to come back. He was threatening to make her life unbearably . . . what? Alive? And carnal. And dangerous. There were too many complexities to him. She knew there were. He was not as sunny natured and even tempered as he always appeared to be, or at least he was not either of those things through and through. She had sensed it before, but last evening she had known it. She had known it from his silences. And from his clipped answer when she had observed that his war experiences must have been dreadful. Yes, he had said. And no. And there had been something in his eyes, in his voice. Something she had shied away from. She had not wanted to know more. She had been afraid. Was that the right word—afraid? Her life had been too bland for too long a time, too structured, too predictable.
He was none of those things.
Then there was the fact that he was so attractive. So good-looking, so tall and broad shouldered. So . . . masculine.
She was just plain afraid to move out into the sun. Or, just as likely, into the storm. Ah, but she wanted sunlight in her life. And excitement. But did she dare? Would she ever dare? Such contradictory thoughts and emotions had teemed through her mind all night. She had woken from a troubled sleep, hoping he would not come—and dreading that he might not.
He had come. And how had she proved that she had hoped he would not? Well, when his knock had sounded upon her back door, she had dropped her knitting in the middle of a stitch, shot to her feet, and rushed to open it lest he think she was away from home and leave before she could get there. Yes, she really had behaved that way.
It was impossible now to keep her eyes off the window for longer than a minute or two at a time—or to move out of the kitchen at all. The weather had turned suddenly warm overnight, as sometimes happened in springtime. By now—it was ten o’clock, Lydia saw with a glance at the clock on the sideboard—the sky was clear, the sun was shining, and Major Westcott was in his shirtsleeves, having abandoned both his coat and his waistcoat. And his sleeves were rolled up to the elbow.
He was suffocatingly attractive. And overwhelmingly masculine. Her mind was beginning to repeat itself.
She turned from the window to take the biscuits out of the oven. She should go and do some more knitting, always soothing to the nerves. She really did need to rescue that stitch she had left stranded between two needles and in danger of becoming enlarged beyond repair. Instead, she glanced outside again. He was stretching, one hand spread over his lower back, the other clasped about the handle of the axe, the head of which was resting on the ground. His buff-colored breeches were skintight and showed off long, shapely, well-muscled legs. His black top boots were old and supple but obviously well cared for. His shirt had pulled partially free at the waist. Sometime since she last looked, a mere few minutes ago, he had discarded his neckcloth, and his shirt was open at the neck. His fair hair, which appeared almost golden in the sunshine, was disheveled. One lock of it had fallen over his forehead.
Snowball was outside with him. After taking noisy exception to his arrival earlier and his obvious intention of staying and taking possession of her back garden and her axe and her woodpile, the dog had capitulated without striking one blow in defense of female independence. She had patrolled the back fence and the trees of the copse a few times, yipping at any bird or squirrel that dared come too close, but she lay now in a fluffy ball of contentment a safe distance from the action to watch and yawn in the sun.
Lydia caught herself feeling envious. She distracted herself by brewing a pot of coffee.
Perhaps they could be friends if nothing else, he had suggested last evening. Was it possible? With a man? During the past year she had acquired a few women friends for the first time in her life. But even an innocent friendship with a man would surely be misconstrued if they spent time alone together. Someone would find out. How could it possibly not happen? Besides, how could one stop a friendship from developing into something else when one already found the other impossibly attractive?
She must thank him with all sincerity when he was finished, offer him refreshments, and then firmly send him on his way.
And then knit him a scarf.
Were ginger biscuits and coffee enough to offer a man who had been hard at work for well over an hour? Perhaps he would need something more substantial. Toast, perhaps? With eggs? She had never had to wonder about such things with Isaiah. Mrs. Elsinore had cooked for them, and Isaiah had always given her orders for the day before he went about his own work. Lydia had hated that arrangement, the way she had been cut out of what ought to have been one of her principal duties. But Isaiah had explained when she had broached the subject with him one day that she ought to be above such menial tasks as planning and preparing meals. She was far better employed doing the Lord’s work as his helpmeet in the parish.
How she had come to hate that word—helpmeet. It was dehumanizing. No, maybe not that. Depersonalizing, then. That was more accurate. If one was a helpmeet, one was useful, perhaps. Busy and helpful, perhaps. Indispensable, maybe. Loyal and obedient, certainly. But one was nothing in oneself. One had no identity separate from the man for whom one was a help and a mate.
It felt undeniably good to be in charge of her own kitchen, wondering what she ought to put before Major Westcott when he had finished chopping her wood. She could feel domesticated to her heart’s content, but she could also please herself, not be forever at the beck and call of some man who happened to be in charge of her life. She did not have to offer the major anything. She did not suppose he expected to be fed, and there was a pump outside from which he could drink water. She could enjoy doing it anyway because she did not have to.
When she left her kitchen, Lydia did not go into the living room to rescue her stretched stitch before knitting on. The blue sky and sunshine beckoned her, and if she remained inside it would be only because he was out there and she was too self-conscious to join him. This was her home, she reminded herself, and that was her wood he was chopping. At the rate he was going there would be enough to last a fortnight even if the weather turned cold again. She wrapped a shawl about her shoulders, opened the back door, and stepped resolutely outside into air that was even warmer than she had expected. It felt like early summer.
Snowball came dashing toward her on legs that were virtually invisible beneath all her
white fur, and yapped excitedly about her ankles until Lydia stooped down and picked her up and cradled her in her arms, drawing back her head with a laugh to avoid the little pink tongue that would have lapped at her face. Major Westcott looked up from the chopping block.
“Harry,” Lydia said. “Enough. Please. I will have to knit you a scarf ten feet long to make up for all this. And perhaps a hat too. Come inside. I have coffee on and biscuits fresh out of the oven. May I make you some toast and eggs too? You must be hungry.”
He propped the axe against the block and turned toward her. “Yellow with red stripes?” he asked—and grinned. And oh dear, he was the one who ought to be breathless, not she. But he was lean and long legged and broad shouldered, with muscles in all the right places. And if he did not close his shirt, though it was only very partially open, she might never get her breath back.
“With orange dots?” she suggested. “Would you like toast and eggs?”
“Perhaps toast and cheese if you have some,” he said. “And freshly baked biscuits, you said? If you feed me so lavishly, Lydia, I will release you from the obligation to knit the hat. It would probably look like a tea cozy on my head anyway and I would be a laughingstock.”
She laughed as though to prove his point and went back inside to slice the bread and start toasting it on the end of the long toasting fork held to the fire. When had she last felt this lighthearted? she asked herself as one side browned and she turned it on the fork. Life had always been a serious business with Isaiah. Frivolity was sin, or at least opened the door to sin. But she would not think about the years of her marriage. Not in any negative way, at least. He had been a good and earnest man.
She had four thick slices of toast piled on a plate by the time Harry came inside. They were keeping warm by the hearth while the butter with which she had lavished them soaked in and she was slicing the cheese. The biscuits were heaped on a plate on the table. The coffee was ready to pour into the large, cheerful mugs she had bought on a whim the last time she had been shopping in Eastleigh with Mrs. Bailey—the same day she had bought her pink dress and the bright yellow wool.
He had washed his hands under the pump outside and was rolling down his shirtsleeves when he stepped into the kitchen. He had already closed his shirt and donned his cravat and his waistcoat.
“Are you willing to tolerate me without my coat, Lydia?” he asked. “I want to go back out after I have eaten to tidy up a bit before I leave.”
“I did not expect you to chop the whole pile,” she told him. “The least I can do is tidy up myself.” Though she had not noticed much of a mess when she was out there.
“I will do it,” he said. “You will be busy knitting.”
“I have made the toast,” she said. “I can make more if necessary. The cheese and the biscuits are on the table. So all I owe you is a scarf? No hat? How sad! Hats are my specialty. And no one has ever mistaken them for tea cozies.”
“Toast and cheese at the expense of cold ears,” he said. “It sounds a fair enough exchange to me. Especially if those biscuits are ginger ones. They smell as if they are. Are they?”
“They are,” she told him as he sat down while she poured their coffee. He stirred milk and a little sugar into his.
“This is a man-sized mug,” he said, lifting it from the table to examine the design. “I approve.”
He ate in silence for a minute or two while Lydia held her own mug between her hands, something she would never have done either as a girl or as a married lady. She even had her elbows on the table. It was quite ungenteel, but the mugs and the sunlight streaming through the window—and his lack of a coat—somehow invited informality. She gazed at him for a while, consciously enjoying the sight of him.
There was definitely darkness in him. But he had not allowed it to prevail in his life. He was habitually good-humored, as he was now. She could not remember seeing him in a somber mood or hearing him say anything that suggested irritability or anger. He was not a complainer. Even his criticism of the pianoforte at Tom and Hannah Corning’s had been made in the form of a joke. She believed he was also a solitary man, though. Despite the friends and friendly acquaintances he had in the neighborhood, there was something suggestive of loneliness about him. He had even admitted it to her that night, though he had spoken of it as part of the general human condition.
She knew there were many facets to his character. The sadder ones he kept to himself while the world saw only the cheerful good nature. She wanted to know all of them, Lydia realized—a disturbing admission when she knew she must discourage any further acquaintance at all.
“Do you resent the man who became Earl of Riverdale in your place?” she asked him. His hand, carrying the last bite of toast to his mouth, paused halfway. He frowned in thought for a moment before returning the toast to his plate.
“It would be difficult to resent Alexander even if I felt so inclined,” he said. “He really did not want the title or the responsibilities that went with it, you know, and his position was made very much more awkward by the fact that my father’s fortune did not accompany the title and properties, since they were entailed and it was not. The fortune went to my father’s only legitimate child—my half sister, Anna, now the Duchess of Netherby. Alex is hardworking and conscientious and has repaired the effects of years of neglect at Brambledean Court, the ancestral home of the earldom. He has done it with the help of Wren, his wife, who brought a fortune of her own to their marriage. He did not marry her just for her money, I must add. They are extremely fond of each other.”
But it still must have been unbearably painful for Harry, Lydia thought, to see his cousin do what ought to have been his task.
“I put all the blame where it belongs,” he continued. “I suppose you know the story. How my father could have done what he did to his first wife when she was dying of consumption and he married my mother for her dowry I do not know. It was a wickedness compounded by the fact that he hid Anna away in an orphanage even though she had maternal grandparents who adored her and would have been only too happy to raise her. And how he could have done what he did to my mother and ultimately to my sisters and me is beyond understanding—or forgiveness. Generally speaking, one is expected to give loyalty and affection to one’s parents, but in the case of my father it has been impossible to do.”
“I am sorry,” she said. “It was an impertinent question.” And what a dreadful burden to bear—the inability to love or respect one’s father.
“Not so,” he said. “Friends ought to be willing to share some personal details with each other.”
He paused and hesitated a few moments, one hand turning his cup on the table. He looked up at her then, and there was something troubled and hard in his eyes, something Lydia had never seen there before. His voice, when he spoke again, was abrupt.
“But friends should also be honest with each other,” he said. “Of course I resented Alex. I hated him. Suddenly he had my title and my properties and my responsibilities. He even had my name, for the love of God. And I hated Anna, who was totally innocent and had grown up in an orphanage not even knowing her true identity. But suddenly she had my birthright and my fortune. She was being welcomed with open arms into the bosom of my family—of which, by the way, I had so recently been the head—while my mother and my sisters were outcast and lost all the identity they had ever known. And there was nothing I could do about it even though I was the man of our own family. When Anna tried to insist that she share the fortune with us, her half siblings, I hated her even more. It seemed like such presumptuous condescension. I was consumed with hatred, Lydia. Perhaps I was fortunate to be able to turn it in a very physical form against the forces of Napoleon Bonaparte, whose ultimate ambition was to invade and take over my country.”
Lydia no longer leaned slightly toward him, her elbows on the table. She sat back in her chair and stared intently across at him. He looked differen
t. His usual expression of open good humor had vanished. Until it returned all in a rush.
“I do beg your pardon,” he said. “That was all probably far more than you wanted to know.”
“But I did ask,” she said.
“You did.” He smiled and then laughed and put the last bite of toast into his mouth with a hand that shook slightly.
“Do you still feel that way?” she asked. She had not seen him as a man who hated or bore grudges. Yet how could he not have done both?
“About Alex and Anna?” He frowned in thought again, his eyes on his mug as he turned it slowly between his hands. “No. And even at first, when everything was too raw for common sense to prevail, I knew that I was being unfair to hate them or even to resent them. Neither had done anything whatsoever to hurt either me or my family. That was all on my father. And Alex genuinely did not want what had been mine. He would have repudiated it if he could. Anna would too, I believe. At the time she was teaching at the orphanage in Bath where she had grown up, and she was contented there and attached to her pupils. It must have been more than bewildering for her suddenly to discover that she had a family—an aristocratic family, no less. And to learn that she was fabulously wealthy. She was pathetically delighted to find that she had a brother and sisters—us. Camille, Abby, and me. We shunned her, turned our backs on her, flatly and contemptuously refused her offer to share her fortune with us. We behaved despicably and shamefully.”
“But very understandably,” Lydia said.
“You are too kind,” he said. “No, I do not still hate them. Or resent them. I can only hope they do not hate me. Or—worse—pity me. It certainly did not help that I was carried home here four years ago, more dead than alive after more than one encounter with an enemy bullet and an enemy blade at Waterloo. Or that Alexander and Avery—the Duke of Netherby, Anna’s husband—helped do the carrying. Hinsford Manor does not even belong to me, you know—or perhaps you did not know. It is Anna’s, though she has tried several times to gift it to me. According to her, I have a moral right to it. And she has insisted upon willing it to me and my descendants. In the meantime we have agreed that I will live here on its income—and pay its expenses. They are good people, Alex and Anna. Better than I deserve.”