by Clare Flynn
A few minutes passed, then Merritt swallowed, took a deep breath and blurted, ‘As we’re both outsiders in Nettlestock and I feel we’re already becoming friends, I wonder if you’d do me the honour of using my Christian name. Reverend Nightingale is such a mouthful. Please call me Merritt.’ He wanted the ground to open up and swallow him as he waited for her response. Why had he wrecked things when they were going so well? Why did he try to rush her?
‘Very well, Merritt, but you must do the same – I’m afraid though that my own name is even more of a mouthful. It’s Hephzibah,’ she said.
‘Ah, Hephzibah, my delight is in thee.’
‘You know your scriptures!’
‘It would be unfortunate for me if I didn’t. Although I must confess my knowledge of the Greek and Roman gods surpasses that of the Old Testament.’ He paused for a few seconds then, conscious that his ears were turning their customary red, added, ‘To tell you the truth, I already knew your name and I consulted my Bible the other day to find the source. It is indeed a most fitting name.’ He looked at her intently.
To his relief, she laughed. ‘My late father – my real father – was extremely fond of reading the Bible. He chose my name. My mother protested, saying it was old-fashioned, but he was determined to have his way.’ She frowned. ‘I had the impression, though I barely remember him, that my father was a man who always got his way.’
‘I dislike my own name intensely,’ he said.
‘Why?’ She gave him a puzzled look. ‘I rather like it. It’s unusual. And it has the benefit of having a mere two syllables.’
He shrugged. ‘Unlike Nightingale.’
‘Now I will not have you complain about that. To share a surname with a songbird is the most romantic thing.’ She sighed. ‘I’d swap you for Wildman!’
His heart hammered as he said the words in his head that he was too fearful to say out loud. Take my surname. It’s yours if you’ll have it. If you’ll have me.
The moment passed. She appeared to be unaware of the ambiguity of her words. She turned to face him. ‘Here we are. With ten minutes to spare.’ She pointed to the clock on the tower of the stable block. ‘Thank you so much, Merritt. I’ve had the most lovely time, since... well, you know... it has been very hard for me to feel the slightest lightness of spirit and this morning I have been... happy. Yes, happy! We must do this again.’ She stretched out her hand to him.
He took her hand in his, feeling her thin fingers through the fabric of her gloves. Before he could stop himself he bent over it and brushed the back of her gloved hand with his lips.
‘Goodbye, Hephzibah, and thank you. Perhaps we can do this again next Sunday?’ Then before she could answer or he could give himself away, he turned on his heels and headed down the drive.
He walked briskly, fuelled by excitement. For the first time since setting eyes on Hephzibah he allowed himself to hope that, given time, she might consent to marry him. Walking the two miles back to the parsonage he indulged himself by imagining her sitting across the dining table from him or sitting at the other side of the fireplace in the drawing room, both of them reading, looking up every now and again from the pages to exchange a glance, a smile, or share something they had read. He pictured her brushing out her long brown hair at the end of the day in what would then be their bedroom.
He gave a little gasp. Dare he hope? She had seemed to enjoy his company. Hadn’t she told him she’d been happy today? She was probably as lonely as he was. She’d given him some encouragement so now he must seize it.
CHAPTER FIVE
And the sunlight clasps the earth
And the moonbeams kiss the sea:
What are all these kissings worth
If thou kiss not me?
(from Love’s Philosophy, Percy Bysshe Shelley)
Hephzibah entered the drawing room, where Sir Richard was sitting beside his daughter on a sofa. The little girl was reading aloud to him from a storybook and, judging by the expression on his face, the squire was becoming impatient. As Hephzibah walked over to join them he took out his fob watch and said, ‘Cutting it fine, Miss Wildman.’
She decided to ignore him. She wasn’t actually late.
When she failed to rise to his bait, the squire changed tack. ‘Ottilie appears to be making some progress already under your tutelage, judging by her reading. Keep it up, Miss Wildman and you may even make a lady out of my little savage.’
Indignant, Ottilie slapped her father on the arm. ‘I’m not a savage, Papa.’
He rose to his feet and Hephzibah was relieved to see that he was wearing shoes.
‘Time for luncheon. Don’t be a bore, child, or next Sunday I’ll have you and Miss Wildman eat in the nursery and you don’t want that, do you?’
‘No, Papa,’ she said, looking down, her big eyes welling with tears.
‘Here. Take this.’ He thrust the book into the girl’s hands. ‘Now where is that idiot? His timekeeping is worse than yours, Miss Wildman.’
‘That idiot is here. I’ve been here for the last thirty minutes.’ A disembodied voice spoke from behind a Chinese lacquer screen that stood in the corner of the room.
Hephzibah jumped. She was unaware of any guests joining them for lunch. Mrs Andrews had said nothing.
The man who stepped out from behind the screen caused her heart to skip a beat. He was somewhere between her own age and about thirty, tall with long legs encased in riding breeches and leather boots. His blue eyes fixed upon Hephzibah.
‘So you’re the new governess,’ he said. His voice was lazy, patrician, indulged, but the sound of it made Hephzibah feel weak-kneed. He moved towards her, those blue eyes appraising her from head to foot and coming back to rest on her face again. His mouth formed a smile which seemed to reach out and wrap around her. ‘Miss Wildman.’ He rolled the syllables of her name in his mouth as though he were tasting fine wine. ‘I’ve heard a lot about you.’
Hephzibah felt herself blushing. ‘I’m afraid you have the better of me, sir.’
The squire drained the contents of his wine glass. ‘This is my son, Thomas. Now let’s go and eat.’ He ushered Hephzibah into the dining room, placing her on his left with Ottilie beside her, while Thomas Egdon sat on his right.
Trying to conceal her nerves, Hephzibah said, ‘When did you arrive, Mr Egdon, and have you travelled far?’
‘Late last night. I’ve been up in town for a week.’
The squire glared at his son. ‘He spends his life in London. And spends my money there too. It’s long past time for him to choose a wife and settle down and give me some grandchildren. There have been Egdons in Nettlestock for five centuries and he seems determined to be the end of the line.’ He slammed his hand down on the table, splashing red wine from the glass he had refilled. ‘Damn it all, Thomas, I’ll take another wife myself if you don’t – and disinherit you.’ He glanced at Hephzibah. ‘Yes, I’ve a mind to do just that. A mother for Ottilie too. That’d stop you from gambling away what little’s left in the estate.’
The conversation and language were hardly suitable for a ten-year-old child and Hephzibah, embarrassed by the outburst, said, ‘Perhaps you would like to discuss this in private with your son, sir? I could ask Mrs Andrews to arrange for Ottilie and me to eat in the nursery so you can speak frankly.’
The squire put his hand on her arm. The pressure was hard, as though he were exerting control over her. ‘You’ll go nowhere. Ottilie’s heard worse before and I daresay she will again. I expect you to make sure she understands the difference between the words that are acceptable for her to use and the words her long-suffering father says when he’s severely provoked.’ He glared at his son who was leaning back in his chair, staring at the ceiling.
One of the maids came in, bearing a tureen of soup, and there was silence until everyone had been served and she exited the room. Hephzibah took the opportunity to examine Thomas Egdon more closely. He was undeniably handsome, with a shock of thick, dark, almost-black hair a
nd those limpid sapphire eyes. She was surprised that he had not seen fit to change out of his riding clothes before sitting down to eat. Perhaps that’s how the landed gentry behaved. It was outside any canon of civilised behaviour known to her. She wondered if he had done it just to provoke his father. There was no disguising the hostility between them. As she looked at Thomas he glanced up and caught her watching him. She felt the blush suffusing her face. He smiled at her and she felt a shiver of pleasure.
‘Yes, I’ve a mind to marry again,’ said the father, his soup spoon suspended just below his blubbery lips. ‘Someone to keep me young and take care of me in my old age. Someone to give me another son, one who won’t be a wastrel and a gambler.’ He slurped his soup and gave a chesty laugh.
Hephzibah wondered what sort of woman of child-bearing age would contemplate marriage to him, then remembered the mystery woman of the night before. The girl in church with the auburn hair. Was she the object of his plans? Then, with a sinking feeling, she realised that Thomas Egdon had arrived late last night. It was more likely that the ribbon thief had been visiting him than his father. She put down her spoon, her appetite gone. She wanted to make her excuses and get up from the table but she knew that she couldn’t.
The squire was still talking. ‘What do you have to say? Is it entirely up to me to safeguard the Egdon name?’
He turned his attention to Hephzibah, who was now rigid with shock. ‘According to village gossip he’s bedded half the young women in Nettlestock and not managed to get a single one of them in trouble, so even if he does take a wife I doubt I can rely on him to produce the goods.’
She looked across the table at Thomas Egdon, who must have been used to this kind of talk from his father, as he carried on eating his soup and appeared not to be listening. Ottilie also ate in silence. What kind of family was this?
It was then that a hand landed on her right thigh. Her leg jerked in reaction and she tried to edge away from his touch, but the squire’s grip was firm. He ran his hand proprietorially up and down her thigh then rested it on her knee and squeezed her leg before taking his hand away. ‘Yes. I’ve a mind to marry again.’
Hephzibah didn’t know how she endured the rest of that wretched luncheon. She tried to steer the conversation onto safer ground, first encouraging Ottilie to tell her father and brother about the book she was reading and getting her to recite a poem she had learned the day before. That occupied but a few minutes. Valiantly, she tried to ask questions about the village and the history of the house, but Thomas Egdon remained silent and his father yawned and told her to ask Mrs Andrews. He drank steadily throughout the rest of the meal, leaving a growing pattern of red wine stains on the tablecloth.
When she was finally reprieved, Hephzibah left Ottilie playing with her dolls and went to walk alone in the gardens. There was a wooden seat under an oak tree where she would be out of sight from the house. As she sat down she realised she was still shaking with anger and fear. It was humiliating. Squire Egdon had treated her as though she were his to do with as he wished. Hephzibah was ashamed that she had not cried out when his hand pawed her leg – and asked herself why she hadn’t. It had been so embarrassing that she had scarcely believed it was happening. She’d also been conscious of Ottilie sitting beside her and Thomas Egdon seated opposite. Her face burned at the thought that he had witnessed her humiliation. Then she reminded herself that the son and heir had been more publicly humiliated than she had. At least the squire’s wandering hands were concealed beneath the tablecloth whereas the aspersions he had cast upon his own son’s manhood were not.
The sun was weak and watery and there was a slight chill in the air. Autumn would soon be coming. Hephzibah inwardly cursed that she had not thought to bring her shawl with her, but was not inclined to go back into the house and risk another encounter with her employer. Instead she decided to go for another walk. Being on the move would warm her up and at least she was getting plenty of exercise.
She followed a path that led in the opposite direction to the village and soon found herself close to a small tributary that fed into the canal. There was no clearly defined towpath here, just a well-worn track, muddy in places from the recent rain. On the other side was an expanse of water meadows, grazed by a few sheep. It was quiet and she stopped, standing still, listening to the sounds of the birds. She would have to get to know them – a project for her to undertake with Ottilie perhaps? There was a large illustrated book of British birds on a side table in the drawing room and she made a mental note to build a lesson around it tomorrow. She wandered along beside the stream, heedless of the mud sticking to her boots, lifting her skirt clear of any puddles.
Hephzibah forced herself to focus on the dilemma that faced her. Here she was with a position that she enjoyed, teaching a child she was already growing fond of, in a part of the country she found attractive and, most important of all, with a modest income and a roof over her head. Until today she had thought of Sir Richard Egdon as an eccentric, a boor, a bit of a bully perhaps but – using Mrs Andrews’ words – with a bark worse than his bite. Now she felt contaminated, dirtied by his insistent hand upon her leg and, worse still, by the words that had accompanied his action. Did he seriously expect that she would marry him? Doubtless he thought of himself as a good catch: a wealthy man with a substantial property. The thought of his swollen red foot, his thick wet lips and those piercing dark eyes with the deep shadows underneath them, made her shiver. He had said he wanted to marry in order to father more children. She felt sick at the thought of him touching her. What was she to do? If he asked and she refused him, she would jeopardise her employment, risk being made homeless. Had this been the fate of all those other governesses? In anger, she kicked at a rotten tree stump by the side of the path, sending up a small shower of damp wood chips.
Being a woman was hard enough, but being a woman alone was worse. Men thought of women as mere commodities to be bargained over. Would this be her fate, pressured to accept the advances of an old, gout-ridden lecher in preference to being cast out on the streets?
As Hephzibah walked along, her mind churning over her lack of choices, she worked hard to convince herself that the squire’s behaviour was down to the fact that he was drunk and just posturing in front of his son. He had already started drinking before luncheon and had gone on to consume an enormous quantity of wine during the meal. People did behave out of character when they drank too much – the students at Oxford had often demonstrated that. Somewhat mollified, she turned back towards Ingleton Hall. She decided to vary her route, taking another path that skirted the edge of a copse of trees.
As she moved towards the copse she saw there was someone there. A man and a woman were leaning against the trunk of a tree, locked in an embrace. Embarrassed, she stopped dead, looking around her for another pathway that would avoid passing close by the couple. As she hesitated, they drew apart and the man ran his hands through the woman’s chestnut hair. She lifted her face up to his. The ribbon thief. The man bent down and dropped a kiss on the top of her head and then she disappeared into the trees. Hephzibah was frozen to the spot.
Thomas Egdon leaned down and picked up his jacket from the ground, brushing off the leaves that had clung to it. He didn’t appear to have seen her and Hephzibah tried to calculate whether she could get out of sight before he noticed her. She looked about but there was nowhere to hide. Going back the way she had come risked that if he spotted her he would think she had walked past him while he was kissing the woman. Hephzibah decided to walk on and hope that he would think she had been too far away to see anything, wondering why his behaviour was making her feel guilty, as though she had done something wrong.
Hephzibah moved slowly along the pathway, looking at the sky and bending now and then to inspect a flower – a piece of theatre designed to convey that she was too preoccupied to have noticed anyone else.
‘Miss Wildman!’ He came over the grass in a half-run. ‘Taking a walk?’
She f
elt herself blushing again. Damn the man. Why did he have this effect on her? She knew it was because she was imagining herself being pushed up against the trunk of that tree and kissed passionately.
He fell into step beside her. ‘I apologise for my father’s behaviour today. He’s always at his worst when he’s in his cups.’
‘It’s not up to you to apologise for him. I think he owes an apology to you, sir,’ she said.
‘Water off a duck’s back. He never varies his routine. It’s such a bore. I’m just sorry you had to listen to it.’
She wondered whether the squire knew about his son’s relationship with the Ribbon Thief, as she had taken to thinking of her. Did Thomas Egdon plan to marry the woman? She supposed he must since he had kissed her so openly. He had done more probably, as the woman had been with him in that bedroom. Did the squire know? If he did, he would be unlikely to regard it a suitable match.
Hephzibah shook her head and tried to change the conversation. ‘The Hall grounds and the area around Nettlestock is very pretty. I’ve been walking beside the stream over there.’
He shrugged. ‘I hate it here. Petty-minded people. Nothing of interest to do. I stay up in town as often as I can. The old man keeps me on short rations, so I have to come back whenever I need a top-up of funds.’
Hephzibah frowned. He did indeed sound like the wastrel his father had called him. ‘How do you spend your time? Are you occupied in some way with the running of the estate?’
He raised his eyebrows. ‘Running the estate? Not much of it left to run and what’s left is mostly handled by the bailiff. Between him and my father, there’s no room left for me. Ingleton Hall saw its best days long ago.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
‘Mishandled by my father who has about as much grasp of land management and modern agricultural methods as Mrs Andrews does.’
Hephzibah glanced sideways at him. He was impossibly handsome. In profile his nose had a slight hook and his chin was strong. His moustache was the same dark silk as his hair and eyebrows. His mouth had a slightly cruel look that made her feel vulnerable and excited and she shivered as she walked beside him.