by Rose Lerner
However, Pennifold came soon after with the visitor’s card, damp and smeared by a wet glove but still legible. Did she know a “Mr. Ashford W. Cahill”?
“He is a stranger in these parts, madam. He had been hoping to view the portrait gallery.”
Oh. He had not come to see her at all.
She was surprised at the depth of her disappointment. Had she really let herself become so dreary that an unwanted caller in the middle of the afternoon was exciting?
The tea was brought in, steam rising invitingly from the pot. “We all know the portrait gallery is the coldest part of the house,” Lydia said briskly. “Probably it’s the coldest part of the county. He’ll catch his death if he doesn’t dry off and take some tea first. Send him in.” It was improper to talk to him without an introduction, but it wasn’t that improper, under the circumstances. The alternatives were refusing him his tour (unkind) or hiding in her own home while he was shown about by the housekeeper (too lowering to be borne).
Pennifold showed in an unassuming man with close-cropped dark hair, somewhere in his midthirties. Everything about him was broad. Broad hands, broad shoulders and chest, broad face with a broad, rather prominent nose. Indeed, his shoulders were so wide and his face so unfashionably tanned that she thought he could not quite be a gentleman despite his refined attire. But his brown eyes, deep-set under broad dark brows, were warm as he gave her a contrite smile.
Lydia opened her mouth to speak to him, enjoying the secret small thrill of doing something slightly improper—but Aunt Packham scurried out in front of her and conferred with the visitor in low tones. His voice was a pleasant tenor. She thought “pleasant” a better word to describe him than “handsome”, poor man, and his accent had more than a touch of Cornwall in it, but he seemed safe enough to talk to, and intent on not giving offense.
Aunt Packham turned back and whispered to Lydia, “May I introduce a Mr. Cahill to you?”
Lydia suppressed a giggle, darting an apologetic glance at their visitor. “You may.”
“Miss Reeve, may I present Mr. Cahill?” Her aunt beamed at having avoided an impropriety.
That was what Lydia needed her for, so it was pointless to be annoyed by it. She nodded at the visitor. “Mr. Cahill.”
“I won’t bow over your hand, Miss Reeve,” he said, bowing from where he stood. “I’d only drip on you. I’m afraid my gloves are marked for death.”
She looked him over. His boots had been hastily wiped downstairs, but enough mud and water remained that they would likely be ruined if they weren’t cleaned soon. She doubted Mr. Cahill was the sort of man who could afford a new pair of boots whenever he liked. Besides, his feet and hands must be freezing. It was unpleasant to think of him catching a chill in her Little Parlor. “Pennifold, please send someone to take the gentleman’s gloves and boots and clean them.”
“That really isn’t necessary, madam,” Mr. Cahill protested as the butler left the room. “I hoped to see the pictures. I shouldn’t like to impose any more than that.”
“Sir, the portrait gallery is chilly in winter.” Lydia tried to keep her exasperation out of her voice. Why couldn’t people take care of themselves? “Colder than outside, generally. It would be very foolish to go there damp.”
The corners of his dark eyes crinkled in amusement, but as there was no derision in it, she found herself laughing too. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve been the lady of the house so long I suppose I try to mother people over whom I have no authority whatsoever.”
He chuckled. “I’m sorry for your loss. My mother also died when I was very young, so it’s rather a comfort to be fussed over.”
Lydia felt a pang of sympathy. “Please, sit.” She poured a finger of brandy from the decanter and passed it to him. “How do you take your tea, sir?”
Sitting in one of the scrollwork armchairs, he tipped back his head and swallowed the brandy in a gulp. The movement of the thin strip of tanned throat above his cravat had a startling effect on her. Beside her, Aunt Packham sniffed.
“I’m sorry.” His little smile managed to be shy without being self-conscious. “I should have sipped that. I’m sure it was very fine. Only I’m colder than I thought, and I wanted the warmth. I take my tea black, thank you.”
She was too experienced a hostess to grimace. At least he wasn’t one of those people who put in far too much milk, like Aunt Packham. She slid the cup and saucer towards him across the table.
Luke, the footman, came in while she was adding a splash of tea to her aunt’s milk. Mr. Cahill stripped off his gloves and handed them over, then yanked off his boots with Luke’s help. His feet and calves were as broad and strong as the rest of him, and there was a red clock at the ankle of his stockings that wiggled as he stretched his feet towards the fire. She looked away hurriedly. “Luke, there is a blanket on the window seat, if you would fetch it for Mr. Cahill.”
The visitor spread the blanket across his knees, but it didn’t help. The mind was a strange thing—put stocking-clad legs under boots and one rarely thought of them, but put them under a blanket and one could think of little else.
“This is a lovely blanket,” he said. “Whose work is it?”
She blinked, looking at the blanket and seeing only his legs shifting beneath it. She had been wrapped in that blanket herself, a few minutes ago. It might yet retain enough warmth from her body for him to guess as much. “Not mine. I’m hopeless with a needle. I bought it at the Gooding Day auction last year. One of the Pink-and-White ladies made it.”
His hands, cradling his teacup, were as tanned as his throat. Either he didn’t often wear gloves, or that was his natural skin color. There was no polite way to ask. “Pink-and-White. That’s the local Tory party, isn’t it?”
“Yes. My father was their patron for many years.” She straightened proudly. “The Society for Bettering the Condition of the Poor’s Gooding Day auction raises money for the widows and old women of the town.”
He smiled. “That’s wonderful. I shouldn’t like to think of a proper lady like you being one of those scoundrelly Whigs.”
She smiled back, relieved. “Are you active in politics in your home district?”
“I don’t spend as much time in my home district as I should,” he confessed. “Wanderlust, I suppose is the word for it. I love England too much to be content with just one little piece of it. My younger brother travels with me, mostly. It’s kind of him. I think lately he’d rather settle down.” He turned his warm brown eyes on the fire and bit his lip—the first thing he’d done that didn’t seem completely comfortable.
His lips were full, and oddly soft in his strong face.
It was rare that she found herself so physically drawn to a man. But there was no harm in it; he couldn’t see her thoughts. No one could. Lydia reflected that the percentage of her thoughts that became somehow tangible, either by speaking or acting, must be very low. Three percent, perhaps. Was that sad? She didn’t feel sad about it, only safe.
She imagined him kissing her. His lips would be soft, but she thought the skin around them would scrape. It was scarcely three o’clock, and there was already a faint dark shadow over most of the lower half of his face. His hand would fan across her lower back, holding her tight and secure.
“Well, Cornwall isn’t a contested county,” she said, absolving him of the sin of being away from home for the recent general election. She didn’t know what to say about his brother. Every commiseration that came to mind was a complaint against Jamie, and she wouldn’t voice them. “Do you mean to return home for Christmas?”
“You can hear the Cornwall, can you? Winter in England isn’t the best time to travel, I suppose.” He gestured at his blanket-covered legs. “But I love spending Christmas somewhere new. Every place celebrates differently. Four years ago I was in a town in Yorkshire that rings their bell once for each year since Christ’s birth. On
e thousand eight hundred and eight peals goes on for a while.”
She shook her head, smiling. “I’ve always spent Christmas here.”
Aunt Packham sniffed. “People ought to spend Christmas at home.”
Mr. Cahill looked taken aback. “I’m sorry, ma’am—”
“My aunt didn’t mean you,” Lydia said hastily. “My brother is visiting some friends for the Christmas season. I assure you I don’t mind.” She gave Aunt Packham a pointed glare for criticizing Jamie to a stranger. “He said he would miss my father too much here. Christmas was always our time together. If I weren’t so stubborn, I would have gone with him.”
Aunt Packham’s eyes snapped. “You have responsibilities here. So does he.” Setting down her teacup with a rattle, she opened her workbox and took out the lace cuffs she was tatting for Gooding Day. “Deuce take it!” Her voice shook as badly as her hands with anxious frustration. “I’ve knotted the thread.”
Lydia was embarrassed that Aunt Packham would swear before Mr. Cahill, but then, the older generation had been born in a less genteel time. She put an arm around her aunt. “You’ll fix it.”
Aunt Packham pushed the work at Lydia. “You do it. My eyes aren’t good enough.”
Lydia winced. She was sure to make it a hundred times worse. She didn’t want to fumble in front of a stranger, her fingers steady at first and then shaking like Aunt Packham’s with self-consciousness and shame. Entertaining a guest made her feel like herself again, competent and serene, and she didn’t want Mr. Cahill to realize it was a lie. “Aunt…”
“Let me, ma’am,” said Mr. Cahill. “Have you got a needle?”
Aunt Packham eyed him with distrust, but when Lydia made no move to help her, she handed the cuff over. “Please don’t let the shuttle unwind.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.” The white lace looked foolish and small in his hands, but his square-tipped fingers were surprisingly deft. As he slid the needle carefully into the center of the knot and coaxed it loose, frowning in concentration, Lydia found herself inexplicably blushing. She sipped her tea to give her cheeks a reason to look flushed.
Handing the tatting back, he met Aunt Packham’s surprised, grateful gaze with a smile. “Aunts of my own,” he said in explanation. “I’m afraid you will have to unwind the shuttle to pull the end through. I couldn’t see a way round it.”
“Thank you,” Lydia said. “I’m no good with a needle or shuttle or…anything, really.”
“You have excellent penmanship, dear,” said her chaperone. It was less a compliment than a bewildered question. The difficulty can’t be your hands, so why…?
“I suppose it’s a matter of application. I correspond regularly, and sew as little as possible.”
Mr. Cahill’s eyes crinkled. “I think words are as important as stitches. Oh, we couldn’t live in the English climate without clothes and blankets, but we’d die just as sure without our connection to each other.”
Lydia felt warm inside and out, warmer than any blanket could have made her. “Do you really think so?”
“You have to make something for Gooding Day, dear,” Aunt Packham pointed out before he could reply.
“I know, Aunt.” Last year she had painted a smudged landscape on glass. Her father had bought it for a ludicrous sum and kissed the top of her head when she thanked him. Who would buy her contribution this year? Someone would do it—to be polite, or gallant, or because they wanted a favor. She felt mortified and desolate at the mere thought. What if she cried at the auction before the entire town?
Mr. Cahill drank his tea in tactful silence, ignoring the tension in the air. At length his boots and gloves and coat were brought in, and Lydia, not ready to be alone again, sent for her cloak and muff. But Aunt Packham, whose joints pained her in winter weather, flatly refused to follow them into the gallery.
Lydia’s maid, Wrenn, was none too eager to go either. She put on her cloak and gloves with a resigned air, muttering, “He must be a real cognoscente if he’s willing to go in there.”
“Surely it can’t be as cold as all that,” Mr. Cahill said.
Lydia raised her eyebrows at Wrenn. “It isn’t. Well, it’s colder than it is outside, probably, but it’s much drier too. It isn’t until the New Year that the room becomes really unbearable. The kitchen stores perishables there quite often.”
Jamie had loved to play in the gallery as a child, liking the novelty of wearing his fur-lined coat indoors. He had loved to steal fruit and cheese, too. She had sat with him on the steps and told him stories about the people in the portraits, just as her mother had done with her when she was small.
She led the way through a chilly anteroom into the long, marble room. Its two levels took up two-thirds the length of the house and half its width. A grand staircase curved down at each end, and high, many-paned windows along the upper promenade looked out over the drowned garden behind the house. The opposite wall was cluttered floor to ceiling with paintings, mostly of dead Reeves. Mr. Cahill seemed to wish to examine every one, leaning out over the balustrade to peer at the highest in a way that alarmed Lydia.
His comments left her in no doubt that not only was he fond of family portraits, but he had visited a great many of them all over the country. He at once placed the artists of several smaller works Lydia had forgotten they even had. “Well, I don’t believe he did much work in England,” he said kindly, to cover her ignorance. “But I saw a pair of wedding portraits he painted at Ragley Hall once, and I never forgot them. The saddest thing I ever saw—you knew the husband was going to drive his wife to an early grave for fretting over his recklessness.”
“And did he?”
He shrugged. “The housekeeper said she died of a wasting fever, but that can mean anything, can’t it?”
Lydia had seen enough people give up and fade away in the course of her work to know it. “Poor lady. Do you think she loved him?”
“Who can say? That’s the trouble with painting separate portraits of married people, you can’t see how they are together. It’s hard on a nosy fellow like me.”
“Perhaps her parents made the match,” she speculated. “I believe it used to be quite common to bully unfortunate girls into unions that were distasteful to them.”
“Isn’t it now?” he said with a cynicism that surprised her.
She sorted through her married friends in her mind. Of course they were all very good matches—except for Caro Jessop running away with a newspaperman—but no more than one or two had really been arranged. “Not as it used to be,” she said at last, confidently. “My father would have liked to see me married, and there were occasions when he pointed out someone who might have been suitable, but my disinclination was always reason enough for him to abandon the idea.”
He looked at her curiously. Oh God, he would think her one of those harpyish females who couldn’t bear to submit to a man’s direction.
Aren’t you?
No. She was only waiting for the right man. To submit to another, one had to esteem his judgment higher than one’s own.
Perhaps you esteem your own judgment too highly.
“Not my disinclination to marriage,” she blurted out. “My disinclination to each specific gentleman.” Oh, and now she sounded over-particular. Could Wrenn hear her? The maid, huddled in the doorway, didn’t look more than usually sarcastic, so probably not.
Mr. Cahill gave her an amused, sidelong glance with no hint of condemnation in it. “I never met the woman who could tempt me, either. I don’t know that I will. Not many women would care to tramp around England.”
Lydia had discouraged a few suitors only because she would have had to make her home in another part of the country. Not having a home at all didn’t bear thinking on. But for a brief, guilty moment, she imagined blowing Jamie and Aunt Packham a kiss and taking to the highway, to eat cheap tasteless food and laugh blithely
at mildewed sheets and rats and stagecoaches stuck in the mud. Lydia knew she wouldn’t enjoy the reality, but she thought Mr. Cahill could make the road pleasant and homey enough for another sort of woman.
“But where is Mr. Gainsborough’s work?” he said after each portrait had been minutely examined. “I’ve only ever seen a few of his paintings, but they astonished me. That combination of life and restraint—it’s quite wonderful.”
Lydia hesitated. “The Gainsborough is in one of the other rooms.” It would look strange if she didn’t explain. But she couldn’t form the words, so she led him to the library, to the unlit fireplace and the painting above it. A combination of life and restraint: that was very apt. In the gray light from the long windows opposite, the painting looked trapped, frozen. As if its dark, muted colors were an enchantment, and if it were lifted, the subjects would come alive.
“It’s you and your mother, isn’t it?” Mr. Cahill asked. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”
Grief rose up from where it always lay waiting now, raking her chest with its claws. No no no no—but her face contorted, her mouth gaping like a wound she couldn’t close. She covered her face tightly with both hands and tried desperately to stop, but it only turned the sobs into horrible wheezing sounds. Her back curved involuntarily, her body curling in on itself like a hedgehog. She wanted to apologize to Mr. Cahill, but couldn’t bear to hear her own voice thick with tears. When would this be over? How many weeks or months until she could keep her sorrow a private, containable thing like this portrait?
Wrenn came to stand quietly at her shoulder, digging through her pockets for a handkerchief.
“I’m so sorry,” Mr. Cahill said. “Take mine.” She reached out blindly and her hand collided with his. He’d been holding his handkerchief near her face so it would be easy for her to take it. “I’d like to ask if there’s anything I can do, but of course there isn’t. Here, I’ll turn my back.”