by Mary Balogh
He was already bored almost beyond endurance.
Was the chit really flirting with him?
4
MOST OF THE GUESTS WERE WEARY FROM TRAVELING and used the time between tea and dinner to rest quietly in their rooms. Wulfric took the opportunity to slip outdoors for some fresh air and exercise. He did not know his way about the park, of course, but he instinctively sought out cover so that he would not be seen from the house and thus invite company. He made his way diagonally across a tree-dotted lawn and took a path through denser trees until he came to the bank of a man-made lake, which had clearly been created for maximum visual effect.
It was not very large, but it was secluded and lovely and peaceful—and completely hidden from the house. It was a pleasant day, warm if not hot, with a light breeze. This, he thought, inhaling deeply, was just what he needed—fresh air and a quiet outdoor setting to restore his spirits after the lengthy journey and the crowded drawing room during tea. There were paths leading off through the trees to either side of him, but he stood where he was, undecided whether to take one of the walks or to remain where he was, simply breathing in the summer scents of water and greenery.
He should have gone home to Lindsey Hall.
But he had not, and so there was no point in wishing now that he had made a different decision.
He was still standing there, content for the moment to be idle, when he heard the distinct rustle of footsteps on the path behind him—the path by which he had come. He was annoyed with himself then that he had not moved off sooner. The last thing he wanted was company. But it was too late now. Whichever of the side paths he took, he would be unable to move out of sight before whoever it was emerged onto the bank and saw him.
He turned with barely concealed annoyance.
She was marching along with quite unladylike strides, minus either bonnet or gloves, and her head was turned back over her shoulder as if to see who was coming along behind her. Before Wulfric could either move out of the way or alert her to impending disaster, she had collided with him full-on. He grasped her upper arms too late and found himself with a noseful of soft curls before she jerked back her head with a squeak of alarm and her nose collided with his.
It seemed somehow almost inevitable, he thought with pained resignation—and with the pain of a smarting nose and watering eyes. Some evil angel must have sent her to this house party just to torment him—or to remind him never again to make an impulsive decision.
Her hand flew to her nose—presumably to discover if it was broken or gushing blood or both. Tears welled in her eyes.
“Mrs. Derrick,” he said with faint hauteur—though it was too late to discourage her from approaching him.
“Oh, dear,” she said, lowering her hand and blinking her eyes, “I am so sorry. How clumsy of me! I was not looking where I was going.”
“You might, then,” he said, “have walked right into the lake if I had not been standing here.”
“But I did not,” she said reasonably. “I had a sudden feeling that I was not alone and looked behind me instead of ahead. And, of all people, it had to be you.”
“I beg your pardon.” He bowed stiffly to her. He might have returned the compliment but did not.
More than ever she looked countrified and without any of the elegance and sophistication he expected of ladies with whom he was obliged to socialize for two weeks. The breeze was ruffling her short curls. The sunlight was making her complexion look more bronzed even than it had appeared in the drawing room. Her teeth looked very white in contrast. Her eyes were as blue as the sky. She was, he conceded grudgingly, really quite startlingly pretty—despite a nose that was reddening by the moment.
“My words were ill mannered,” she said with a smile. “I did not mean them quite the way they sounded. But first I spilled lemonade over you, then I engaged you in a staring match only because I objected to your eyebrow, and now I have run into you and cracked your nose with my own. I do hope I have used up a whole two weeks’ worth of clumsiness all within a few hours and can be quite decorous and graceful and really rather boring for the rest of my stay here.”
There was not much to be said in response to such a frank speech. But during it she had revealed a great deal about herself, none of which was in any way appealing.
“My choice of path appears to have been serendipitous,” he said, turning slightly away from her. “The lake was unexpected, but it is pleasantly situated.”
“Oh, yes, indeed,” she agreed. “It has always been one of my favorite parts of the park.”
“Doubtless,” he said, planning his escape, “you came out here to be alone. I have disturbed you.”
“Not at all,” she said brightly. “Besides, I came out here to walk. There is a path that winds its way all about the lake. It has been carefully planned to give a variety of sensual pleasures.”
Her eyes caught and held his and she grimaced and blushed.
“Sometimes,” she added, “I do not choose my words with care.”
Sensual pleasures. That was the phrase that must have embarrassed her.
But instead of striking off immediately onto her chosen path, she hesitated a moment, and he realized that he stood in her way. But before he could move, she spoke again.
“Perhaps,” she said, “you would care to accompany me?”
He absolutely would not care for any such thing. He could think of no less desirable a way of spending the free hour or so before he must change for dinner.
“Or perhaps,” she said with that laughter in her eyes that he had noticed earlier across the drawing room after he had raised his eyebrow and so offended her, “you would not.”
It was spoken like a challenge. And really, he thought, there was something mildly fascinating about the woman. She was so very different from any other woman he had ever encountered. And at least there was nothing remotely flirtatious in her manner.
“I would,” he said, and stepped aside for her to precede him onto the path that led back in among the trees, though it ran parallel to the bank of the lake. He fell into step beside her, since the person who had designed this walk had had the forethought to make it wide enough for two persons to walk comfortably abreast.
They did not talk for a while. Although as a gentleman he was adept at making polite conversation, he had never been a proponent of making noise simply for the sake of keeping the silence at bay. If she was content to stroll quietly, then so was he.
“I believe I have you to thank for my invitation to Schofield,” she said at last, smiling sidelong at him.
“Indeed?” He looked back at her with raised eyebrows.
“After you had been invited,” she said, “Melanie suddenly panicked at the realization that she was to have one more gentleman than lady on her guest list. She dashed off a letter to Hyacinth Cottage to invite me, and, after I had refused, came in person to beg.”
She had just confirmed what he had been beginning to suspect.
“After I had been invited,” he repeated. “By Viscount Mowbury. I daresay the invitation did not come from Lady Renable after all, then.”
“I would not worry about it if I were you,” she said. “Once I had rescued her from impending disaster by agreeing to come after all, she admitted that even if having the Duke of Bewcastle as a guest was not quite such a coup as having the Prince Regent might have been, it was in fact far preferable. She claims—probably quite rightly—that she will be the envy of every other hostess in England.”
He continued to look at her. Then an evil angel really had been at work. She was here only because he was—and he was here only because he had acted quite out of character.
“You did not wish to accept your invitation?” he asked her.
“I did not.” She had been swinging her arms in quite unladylike fashion, but now she clasped them behind her back.
“Because you were offended at being omitted from the original guest list?” She was normally treated as a poor relation a
nd largely ignored, then, was she?
“Because, strange as it may seem, I did not want to come,” she told him.
“Perhaps,” he suggested, “you feel out of your depth in superior company, Mrs. Derrick.”
“I would question your definition of superior,” she said. “But in essence you are quite right.”
“And yet,” he said, “you were married to a brother of Viscount Elrick.”
“And so I was,” she said cheerfully.
But she did not pursue that line of conversation. They had emerged from among the trees and were at the foot of a grassy hill dotted with daisies and buttercups.
“Is this not a lovely hill?” she asked him, probably rhetorically. “You see? It takes us above the treetops and gives us a clear view of the village and the farms for miles around. The countryside is like a checkered blanket. Who would ever choose town life over this?”
She did not wait for him or mince her way up the rather steep slope. She strode up ahead of him to the very top of the hill, though they might have skirted around its base, and stood there, spreading her arms to the sides and twirling once about, her face lifted to the sunlight. The breeze, which was more like a wind up there, whipped at her hair and her dress and set the ribbons that tied the latter at the waist streaming outward.
She looked like a woodland nymph, and yet it seemed to him that her movements and gestures were quite uncontrived and unselfconscious. What might have been coquetry in another woman was sheer exuberant delight in her. He had the strange feeling of having stepped—unwillingly—into an alien world.
“Who indeed?” he said.
Mrs. Derrick stopped to regard him.
“Do you prefer the countryside?” she asked.
“I do,” he said, climbing until he was beside her and turning slowly about in order to see the full panorama of the surrounding countryside.
“Why do you spend so much time in town, then?” she asked.
“I am a member of the House of Lords,” he told her. “It is my duty to attend whenever it is in session.”
He was looking down at the village.
“The church is pretty, is it not?” she said. “The spire was rebuilt twenty years ago after the old one was blown off in a storm. I can remember both the storm and the rebuilding. This spire is twenty feet higher than the old one.”
“That is the vicarage next to it?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “We practically grew up there, my two sisters and I, with the old vicar and his wife. They were kind and hospitable people. Their two daughters were our particular friends, and so was their son, Charles, to a lesser degree. He was one boy among five girls, poor lad. We all went to the village school together, girls as well as boys. Fortunately my father, who taught us, was not of the persuasion that girls have nothing but fluff to keep their ears from collapsing in on each other. Louisa and Catherine both married young and now live some distance away. But after the old vicar and his wife died, within two months of each other, Charles, who had been a curate twenty miles from here, was given the living himself and married Hazel—the middle sister of my family.”
“Your eldest sister is married too?” he asked.
“Eleanor?” She shook her head. “She announced when she was twelve years old that she intended remaining at home after she grew up to be a comfort to Mama and Papa in their old age. She did fall in love once, but he died at the Battle of Talavera before they married, and after that she would not look at any other man. After our father died she repeated what she had always said as a girl, though now, of course, it is only our mother she needs to comfort. I believe she is happy.”
Yes, he thought, she really was from a different world—the world of the lower gentry. She had indeed made a brilliant marriage.
She stretched out one arm and moved a step closer to him so that he would be able to see just what it was she pointed at.
“There is Hyacinth Cottage,” she said. “It is where we live. I have always thought it picturesque. There was a moment of anxiety after my father died, since the lease was in his name alone. But Bertie—Baron Renable—was kind enough to lease it to Mama and Eleanor for the rest of their lives.”
“On the assumption,” he said, “that you will not outlive the two of them?”
She returned her arm to her side. “I was still married to Oscar at the time,” she said. “His death was not predictable, but even if it had been, Bertie would have assumed, I suppose, that I would remain with his family.”
“But you did not?” he asked her.
“No.”
He looked at Hyacinth Cottage in the middle distance. It looked a pretty enough home, with its thatched roof and sizable garden. It looked like one of the larger houses in the village, as befitted the home of a gentleman by birth, even if he had also been the schoolmaster.
Mrs. Derrick, standing quietly beside him, chuckled softly.
Wulfric turned his head to look at her.
“I have done something to amuse you again, Mrs. Derrick?” he asked.
“Not really.” She smiled at him. “But it has struck me how like a doll’s house Hyacinth Cottage looks from up here. It would probably fit into one corner of the drawing room at wherever you live.”
“Lindsey Hall?” he said. “I doubt it. I perceive that there are four bedrooms upstairs and as many rooms downstairs.”
“Perhaps the corner of your ballroom, then,” she said.
“Perhaps,” he agreed, though he doubted it. It was an amusing image, though.
“If we follow the path right around the lake at this pace,” she said, “we may arrive back at the house in time to scrounge a biscuit or two with our late-evening tea.”
“Then we will move on,” he said.
“Perhaps,” she said, “you did not intend to walk so far. Perhaps you would prefer to return the way we have come while I continue on my way.”
There it was—his cue to escape. Why he did not take it, he had no idea. Perhaps it was that he was unaccustomed to being dismissed.
“Are you by any chance, Mrs. Derrick,” he asked, grasping the handle of his quizzing glass and raising it all the way to his eye to regard her through it—simply because he knew the gesture would annoy her, “trying to be rid of me?”
But she laughed instead.
“I merely thought,” she said, “that perhaps you are accustomed to riding everywhere or being conveyed by carriage. I would not wish to be responsible for blisters on your feet.”
“Or for my missing my dinner?” He lowered his glass and let it swing free on its ribbon. “You are kind, ma’am, but I will not hold you responsible for either possible disaster.”
With one hand he indicated the path down the other side of the hill. For a short distance, he could see, the path then followed the bank of the lake before disappearing among the trees again.
She asked questions as they walked. She asked him about Lindsey Hall in Hampshire and about his other estates. She seemed particularly interested in his Welsh property on a remote peninsula close to the sea. She asked about his brothers and sisters, and then, when she knew they were all married, about their spouses and children. He talked more about himself than he could remember doing in a long while.
When they emerged from the trees again, they were close to a pretty, humpbacked stone bridge across a stream that flowed rather swiftly between steep banks on its way to feed the lake. Sunshine gleamed off the water as they stood at the center of the bridge and Mrs. Derrick leaned her arms on the stone parapet. Birds were singing. It was really quite an idyllic scene.
“It was just here,” she said, her voice suddenly dreamy, “that Oscar kissed me for the first time and asked me to marry him. So much water has passed beneath the bridge since that evening—in more ways than one.”
Wulfric did not comment. He hoped she was not about to pour out a lot of sentimental drivel about that romance and the gravity of her loss. But when she turned her head to look at him, she did so rather
sharply, and she was blushing. He guessed that she had forgotten herself for a moment—and he was delighted that she had recollected herself so soon.
“Do you love Lindsey Hall and your other estates?” she asked him.
Only a woman—a sentimental woman—could ask such a question.
“Love is perhaps an extravagant word to use of stone and mortar and the land, Mrs. Derrick,” he said. “I see that they are well administered. I attend to my responsibilities for all who draw a living from my properties. I spend as much time as I can in the country.”
“And do you love your brothers and sisters?” she asked.
He raised his eyebrows.
“Love,” he said. “It is a word used by women, Mrs. Derrick, and in my experience encompasses such a wide range of emotions that it is virtually useless in conveying meaning. Women love their husbands, their children, their lapdogs, and the newest gewgaw they have purchased. They love walks in the park and the newest novel borrowed from the subscription library and babies and sunshine and roses. I did my duty by my brothers and sisters and saw them all well and contentedly married. I write to each of them once a month. I would, I suppose, die for any one of them if such a noble and ostentatious sacrifice were ever called for. Is that love? I leave it to you to decide.”
She gazed at him for a while without speaking.
“You choose to speak of women’s sensibilities with scorn,” she said then. “Yes, we feel love for all the things you mentioned and more. I would not want to live, I believe, if my life were not filled with love of almost everything and everyone that is involved in it with me. It is not an emotion to inspire contempt. It is an attitude to life directly opposed, perhaps, to that attitude which sees life only as a series of duties to be performed or burdens to be borne. And of course the word love has many shades of meaning, as do many, many of the words in our living, breathing language. But though we may speak of loving roses and of loving children, our minds and sensibilities clearly understand that the emotion is not the same at all. We feel a delighted stirring of the senses at the sight of a perfect rose. We feel a deep stirring of the heart at the sight of a child who is our own or closely connected to us by family ties. I will not be made ashamed of the tenderness I feel for my sisters and for my niece and nephews.”