Breathless, she pulled away. “What was that for?” He kissed her again, slowly and thoroughly, and when he was finished she had the answer to her question.
They broke away, both remembering at the same moment that the door was open. Smiling the same secret smile, they took up places on either side of the mantel, a discreet six feet apart, Sebastian with his hands in his pockets and rocking on his toes a little, the conscientious country squire having a word of business with his housekeeper.
Rachel heard herself blurt out, “Miss Deene is very attractive, isn’t she?” She could have bitten her tongue.
“Yes, she is,” he agreed, a little too heartily. “Bright, too. I like the way her mind works. I like her enthusiasm.” Rachel nodded glumly. “As a woman, what’s your impression of her?”
“My impression?”
“Yes. Would you trust her? Does she seem competent to you? Levelheaded, honest?”
“Yes, all of those, I suppose. But of course,” she couldn’t help adding, “I hardly know her.”
“No, but I value your opinion. And I’m inclined to agree with you. Which is why I’ve decided to invest in Sophie’s mine and not her uncle’s. It won’t endear me to Mayor Vanstone, but that can’t be helped. What are you smiling about?”
“Nothing.” She resolutely wiped the grin from her face. But she couldn’t help feeling relieved that he was interested in the beautiful Miss Deene as a business associate, not as a woman.
“I’ve got a surprise for you,” he said softly. She blushed; he laughed. “Not that kind of surprise, nothing you have to take your clothes off for. Unless, of course, you want to.”
She had a fleeting vision of it, herself naked for him right now, right here. The blush deepened; she actually felt weak in the knees. She fiddled with a candlestick on the mantel, pretending nonchalance, but Sebastian’s alert look told her she wasn’t succeeding. “What is the surprise?” she asked carelessly, and he laughed again.
“Come and see.” And he took her hand and pulled her out of the room.
They passed down the corridor toward the east wing of the house. He was taking her either to the library, the chapel, or her own room, and it said something for the deplorable state of her mind that she hoped it was the latter. But it wasn’t; it was the library. Most of the floor space was taken up by three enormous wooden packing crates and half a dozen smaller ones.
“Guess what’s in them,” Sebastian challenged, sitting down on one of the big crates and folding his arms.
The only guess was the best guess. “Books,” she said hopefully.
“No. Dogs. All different sizes, males and females, purebreds and mongrels, furry ones, sleek ones—”
“They’re not, they’re books! Oh, lovely. They are books, aren’t they?” When he said yes, she clapped her hands in delight. “Can we open them? Oh, Sebastian, how wonderful. But where will you put them? There must be a hundred here.”
“Over three hundred, actually. Handpicked by a London bookseller I know and trust. I told him I wanted new books, nothing more than twenty years old, because I have a peevish housekeeper too smart for her own good who keeps grousing about the shortcomings of my library.”
She laughed gaily. “But there’s no room—you’ll have to add an annex!”
“Well, what I thought we could do—you could do, since the books belong to you—I thought you might go through the old ones and weed out the wheat from the chaff, the chaff being the ones you’ve already read. Keep whatever you think is worthwhile, I leave it entirely up to you. For the rest, I thought we might give them to the subscription library Christy Morrell is trying to start for the parish.”
“Oh, that’s a wonderful plan.” Of course the books didn’t belong to her; the very idea was too outlandish to contemplate. But he’d ordered them with her in mind as the primary reader, and the thoughtfulness of that added another snarl to her already tangled emotional state. How could she accept more things from him, even nominally, even when she had no intention of keeping them?
“Look.” He’d prized open one of the smaller crates and was lifting books out by the handful. “Turgenev, Trollope, Thackeray, Tennyson—this must be the T box. No, it’s not, because here’s Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and here’s Browning and Balzac. Have you read them all, my little bluestocking? You couldn’t have read this—Little Dorrit, Dickens—because it’s only just come out. Do you like plays? Poetry? We have Ibsen, we have Dostoevsky, Charlotte Brontë, Mrs. Gaskell. I know you think I’m an illiterate, but here’s one I’ve actually read myself—La Dame awe Camelias. Great pathos; reduced me to tears, I don’t mind admitting.”
She would be reduced to tears herself in another minute. Each new volume was a wonder, a miracle. In prison, reading had saved her life—literally, she truly believed—and even though her new life was rich and full, sensually and intellectually alive, stimulating, dazzling in comparison to her old one, she’d missed the pleasure of new books, new voices. “If you had given me jewels,” she said haltingly, “if you had given me paintings on—gold—you couldn’t have made me any happier. Thank you. Thank you. That’s inadequate, I know, but there aren’t any words to tell you what I’m feeling.”
His eyes softened with tenderness. He threw down the book in his hand and came to her. She thought he meant to embrace her, but he only took her hand. “There’s more.”
She started shaking her head. “What do you mean? How could there be?”
“I’ve had a letter from my mother, Rachel. She says my father’s worse.”
“Oh, no.”
“She’s said it before, but this time it might really be true. In any event, it looks as if I’ll have to go to Rye.”
“Oh, Sebastian. I’m so sorry.”
He sent her a quizzical look. “Its all right. Thank you for your sympathy, darling, but it’s not necessary. I’ve told you before, there’s no love lost in my family. When my father dies, I’ll go through the proper forms for decency’s sake, but I won’t pretend that his passing means anything to me.”
He seemed to mean it. He said it without bitterness or irony, simply as a statement of fact. “I’m sorry,” she said again, because it was sad.
He made a dismissive gesture. “The point is, I’ve got to leave for Steyne Court tomorrow. I wanted this to be a surprise, but I can’t see how to manage it without barring you from the entire west side of the house.”
She frowned. “What?”
His eyes twinkled with suppressed excitement. He waited, watching her, prolonging the suspense. “I wish I had a picture to show you. Well, I do, actually, come to think of it, but it’s not—you won’t really be able to see the thing, at least I can’t, it looks like a lot of squiggles to me—”
“What?”
He waited another excruciating minute. “All right, I’ll tell you. I’m having a glass conservatory built on the west wing, oening off the great hall. That day I was in Plymouth, I hired a fellow to design it, a landscape architect, supposed to know what he’s doing. He sent me these drawings”—he opened a drawer in the big library table and pulled out a sheaf of papers—“but I can’t make much out of them.” He put the papers in her hand.
“Anyway, it’ll be big and it’ll overlook the river. He’s built in all sorts of things I told him you wanted—a shed for your tools, a separate place for a table and a bench where you can sit and have tea or read a book, whatever you like, plus it’s heated in winter—your sitting place, I mean—with a stove that’s shielded from the plants so they don’t get too hot. Which doesn’t seem like something you’d have to worry about in wintertime, but apparently it’s a danger. This here, this taller part, he calls that the orangery. Pretty, isn’t it? Can you picture it? Think of it as a tower on a house; I think it’ll be quite graceful-looking as you approach the house from the bridge. It’s for orange trees, of course, or lemon trees, although you’d
have to call it a lemonary then, I suppose. The architect fellow says you could do camellias there, too, since apparently they can grow very tall in the Devon climate. He suggested a fernery as well, but I thought that was a bit much. I mean, where does it end, where does one draw the line? A rosary, a gladiolary, a petuniary. But of course if you want a fernery, that would be an entirely different thing. I suppose it might be all right, damp and close, aquatic, somewhat fetal, really, but—”
He stopped, finally realizing she was crying. She’d turned her back to him, pretending to be absorbed in the architect’s diagrams, but she couldn’t see anything because her eves were blurry with tears.
“Ah, Rachel.” He sighed, stroking her shoulders. He didn’t ask why she was weeping, and she was glad. “Don’t be afraid to be happy, darling. Open yourself up. Take what I want to give you.”
She let him hold her, press her hack into his arms, squeezing her tight against his chest. A rather bleak insight came to her, warring with the fledgling joy that wanted to burst out and take over: it wasn’t that she was afraid of happiness, not anymore; what she feared was losing everything. And everything had come to mean Sebastian.
“I’ll miss you,” she told him, turning in his arms. “I wish . . .” But she didn’t finish the thought. It wasn’t in her yet to wish for things.
He rested his cheek against hers. “I wish you could come with me. I would take you, but you’d hate it, and I wouldn’t inflict my family on anyone. Least of all you.” He let his fingers drift over her cheek. “Smile for me, Rachel. How beautiful you are, even though your eyes are sad. Do you like your gift?”
She couldn’t speak, only nod. She thought of the day she’d told him of her prison daydream—that her cell was a greenhouse filled with flowers and damp, sweet-smelling earth. Her heart ached, and she knew that what she felt for him was love, not gratitude. A complicated love, born out of need and helplessness at first, but moving away from them as time went by, moving into a cleaner, clearer place as she grew stronger, less dependent on him for survival. Where would it end? Maybe, without knowing it, he was helping her to prepare for the day when she’d have to live without him. Maybe—but why not be happy now anyway? Why not seize the chance for it that he held out to her time after time, disregarding his motives, accepting his gifts not just with thanks but with gladness? Why not?
“I love it,” she answered, holding his face between her hands. I love you, she thought, and kissed his lips before he could see it in her eyes. “God keep you safe, Sebastian. I hope you find some peace with your family.”
“It won’t happen. The only thing I hope is to come back to you soon.” He kissed her, with a mixture of passion and tenderness that devastated her. She clung to him, shameless. As long as he held her, she could pretend that his home was here, with her.
“Tell me again that you’ll miss me,” he said.
“I will miss you.” But she was thinking of the future.
***
Three days after Sebastian left for Rye, a letter arrived, addressed to Rachel, from the Home Secretary in Whitehall. She opened it fearfully, as she did any official document that came her way, never able to shake off a baseless fear that the gates of prison were reopening to take her back. What she found was a letter, signed by the Secretary, ordering an immediate remittal of her ticket of leave. She stared at the one-paragraph message for a full minute, reading it again and again, unable to believe her eyes. The Secretary gave no reason for this astonishing piece of news; he simply stated that Her Majesty was pleased to set aside the remaining conditions of release of Rachel Wade’s license to be at large; Mrs. Wade was no longer subject to such conditions and was now and henceforth free of all parole obligations.
No more weekly visits to the parish constable—no more monthly visits to the chief constable’s office in Tavistock. No more payments toward her fine. She was free.
She couldn’t contain herself. Happiness and frustration made her feel manic—how could she wait until Sebastian came home to tell him? She was bursting with the news, dying to share it with someone. Who? There wasn’t anyone—so she did a little dance on her sitting-room rug with Dandy, and only stopped when his excited barking threatened to bring the servants knocking at her door.
The next day was Sunday. She dressed with special care, even donning the stylish flowered hat Sebastian had bought for her that long-ago day at Miss Carter’s. Declining a ride in the carriage with the other servants, she walked to church because the day was perfect, and she sat in a back pew and stared at her neighbors through new eyes. Could it be true that her presence disgusted no one, scandalized no one? Certainly the looks she intercepted were bland, sometimes courteous, sometimes even—imagine it—friendly. The inevitable inference was that she herself had been responsible—partly—for her own isolation: she’d turned herself into a pariah by assuming she was one. Could it be true? Lydia Wade was nowhere in sight; if she had been, a very different perception of the atmosphere in All Saints Church this morning would surely have colored her conclusion. But in the absence of the one person in the world who truly hated her, Rachel was free for once to feel normal. A resident of a village, a parishioner of a church, an employee of a household—a citizen of the Empire. What power, what an undervalued privilege; what rich contentment ordinariness conveyed. For the first time in many years, she gave thanks to God for a blessing and meant it.
Reverend Christian Morrell delivered one of his fine, rather long sermons, this one on the virtue of tolerance, and afterward he asked the congregation to pray for the repose of the soul of Mrs. Eleanor Weedie, an elderly parishioner who, he said, had died peacefully in her sleep on Thursday evening. Rachel stole a glance through her lashes at Miss Weedie, the deceased’s middle-aged daughter, who stood with her head bowed a few pews closer to the chancel. Beside her, hovering over her solicitously, stood Captain Carnock, one of the magistrates at Rachel’s hearing. He was a gentleman farmer when he wasn’t administering justice. At the hearing, she’d thought him thick-witted and heartless, but now she saw him in a different light. His face, even his posture looked benign and protective; he cared for the grieving daughter of Mrs. Weedie, and he seemed to be feeling the same pain she felt.
How many other people had Rachel misjudged?
Outside on the church steps, she shook Reverend Morrell’s hand and told him she’d enjoyed his sermon. His handsome face looked skeptical, but he only thanked her, and invited her to attend a “penny reading” in the vicarage meeting room on Friday evening next, when his wife was set to begin reading Villette in weekly installments to as many parishioners who cared to come and hear it. “It’s a pleasant way to meet people,” he added, smiling his rather beatific smile. She murmured noncommittally, but the idea intrigued her.
Just then Anne waved to her from the bottom of the steps, and Rachel bade farewell to the vicar and went to greet his wife. She looked young, fresh, and uncommonly pretty in a tartan skirt and crimson blouse—an ensemble Rachel would not have expected the wife of a minister to wear to church, but which looked charming on her nonetheless. It also failed to even try to hide the interesting fact that she was at least four months pregnant. The two women greeted each other amiably, Rachel mentioning that she’d heard from Miss Deene that Anne had been unwell, and she was happy to find her completely recovered.
“Oh, did Sophie say ‘unwell’? How delicate of her,” Anne said with warm, laughing eyes. She had a lovely way, Rachel thought, of puncturing social conventions without wounding individuals. “No, as you can see, I’m in the very pink of health. Dr. Hesselius is a little old-fashioned; if he and Christy had their way, I’d be in bed till Christmas.” Rachel took that to be her delicate way of confiding her baby’s due date. “But you,” she exclaimed, standing back and making a show of looking Rachel up and down. “You look wonderful! I think our little village agrees with you.”
Rachel thanked her, coloring a little, but p
rivately delighted with the compliment.
“I understand Lord D’Aubrey’s gone to Sussex to visit his father.”
“Yes, the earl is very ill. But there’s been no word yet, and we don’t know how much longer he intends to stay away.”
They spoke of casual things for another moment, before Anne hesitated and then said in a low, apologetic voice, “Wyckerley is so tiny, we all know one another’s business; and of course it isn’t only the servants who gossip, as much as we like to pretend we’re above such things.” Rachel felt her face tighten, and wondered exactly what bit of gossip had reached Anne’s ears. “You may already have heard this, but if not, I thought it would interest you to know that Claude Sully has been seen in the neighborhood.”
“Oh,” Rachel said, taken aback. It wasn’t the news she’d been expecting.
“He’s a thoroughly unpleasant person,” she went on, nodding as if agreeing with Rachel—who must have given her thoughts away by her expression.
“I wasn’t aware that you knew him.”
“Yes, I know him. He was a friend of my late husband. I detest him,” Anne added with surprising vehemence. “I’m sure he’s harmless—cowards usually are—but I thought you should know that he’s here.”
Rachel remembered the threat Sully had made before Sebastian had thrown him out of the house. It ought not to surprise her that others had heard of it; half the Lynton Hall domestic staff had witnessed the late-night brawl. “Thank you for telling me,” she said faintly.
Anne nodded. “You mustn’t worry. He’s here on business, I believe. Evidently he has some financial interests he inherited from . . .”
“From my late husband,” Rachel finished for her. There was a short, awkward pause.
“Now that I’m all well again, why don’t you come and visit me one day soon?” Anne suggested. “Come for tea—I’d love that.”
“I will. I’d like it very much.”
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