Katherine, When She Smiled

by Harmon, Joyce

  Recalling her first meeting with Lord Charles, Katherine reflected that such a young lady might be just the thing for him. “How does it come about that she is still single?” she asked. “If she’s of an age to play with you and your brother, surely she’s out by now.”

  “Oh, yes,” Clara said. “Amanda came out. Had two seasons before she put her foot down. She had plenty of suitors, as cheerful and good-natured as she is, besides being tolerable looking and pretty well to pass, thanks to an inheritance from an aunt. Half-pay officers and penniless younger sons came flocking. But she found none to suit her, and found London not to her taste. She travels a great deal now, from her home to the homes of relations. She usually spends the summer with her grandmother in Bath, so I reached her there and invited her to Greymere. She greatly prefers the country to town, another way in which she and Charles are compatible.”

  Katherine said, “It sounds like you are indeed well on the way to have Lord Charles settled.”

  “Indeed, I am,” Clara agreed smugly.

  After Clara left, Katherine sighed as she reentered the house. Had she herself ever been a ‘jolly girl’? Perhaps, long ago, when she was very young. She remembered an occasion from years past, herself and Julia chasing one another through the shrubbery, trying to hide, but giggling too much to remain hidden for long. Such fun that had been! Growing up, she decided, was not all that one imagined it would be. Sometimes she wished she could just leap on a horse and ride and ride and ride, away from Rosebourne and Mrs. Wilson and the responsibilities of caring for a family.

  Jumping on a horse and riding? The riding horses at Rosebourne were gentle beasts, those decreed suitable mounts for ladies, so a wild ride was out of the question. But she could ride at least. She sent word to the stable to saddle her horse, and went upstairs to don her riding habit. She hadn’t ridden since before Papa died.

  Katherine rode gently down the lane, enjoying the peace and the unaccustomed exercise. She felt a twinge of guilt at not inviting Helen to ride with her, but also relief that she didn’t have to sustain a conversation over daily trivialities. She patted Daisy’s neck. Not flashy and certainly not spirited, but a good mare nonetheless. She listened to the lazy chirp of the birds and the slight drone of bees.

  After a time, riding in the sun became uncomfortably warm, so Katherine turned her mount down a path running along a stream that fed eventually into the Piddle River. It was cooler here, in the shade beside the water. She thought of the wild ride she’d imagined taking, and decided that if she could not take such a ride, there was certainly no reason why Euphonia couldn’t. In fact, now that she was on to the Baron’s devious tricks, surely escape would be her first consideration.

  A fiery steed and a midnight escape! The moon would be full, of course, and the wind whipping powerfully. Of course, the escape could not succeed, it was too easy a ploy and the novel was nowhere near finished, but it would give Euphonia some excitement and allow her to show some spirit, something she’d been sadly lacking to this point. Katherine smiled as she imagined Aunt Alice’s eager reading aloud of the latest from the pen of Mrs. Wilson.

  Then she realized she was not alone, and looked up to see her brother and his friend fishing. To be more accurate, Jack was fishing. Han had been fishing, as evidenced by the pole discarded along the bank. But at this moment, he was seated on the ground, his back to a tree trunk and a sketch pad opened on his knees. He was watching her silently.

  Katherine rode up to the boys and slide off Daisy. She looped the reins loosely over a tree limb and joined them on the stream bank. “How are they biting?” she asked softly.

  “Shh!” was Jack’s impolite response.

  “Don’t be such a gudgeon,” Han told him. “We’ve been talking all along and that hasn’t stopped you from catching fish.” To Katherine, he said, “You may sit down if you like.”

  “Thank you, I believe I shall,” she replied, spreading a handkerchief over a handy tree root and settling onto it with a sigh of satisfaction. She looked over at Han and saw the drawing he was working on. It was a realistic portrayal of Jack, leaning back against the pull of the rod, with a large fish leaping and twisting on the end of the line.

  “How lifelike!” she marveled.

  “It is rather good, I think,” Han said modestly. “Fish is a new subject matter for me, and depicting the scales is a tricky business, but I think I’ve got the way of it now.”

  “Indeed you have,” Katherine agreed.

  Han gestured at his rod. “Would you like to fish? You can use my rod. I was fishing for a while, but I bore easily.”

  “No, thank you,” Katherine replied. “I have fished, but it’s not a pastime I care for, really.” She reflected sadly that this must mean she was most certainly not a ‘jolly girl’. “I’ll just sit here, if you don’t mind, admiring the view and enjoying the peace.”

  “Feel free,” Han told her politely.

  Katherine leaned back against the tree trunk, admiring the pattern of leaves and the play of light in the gentle breeze. It was some time later when an amused voice broke the silence.

  “Well, this is a bucolic scene!”

  Katherine sat up suddenly, to see Lord Charles advancing toward them, his horse’s reins looped over his arm.

  TEN

  “Hallo, Charles,” said Han.

  “Might I join you?” Charles asked.

  Katherine waved at the ground. “We are on your land, after all,” she said.

  Charles looked around, getting his bearings. “By Jove, I believe you’re right.”

  He settled himself onto the ground and turned to Katherine. “I see that Han is drawing and Jack is fishing. But what are you doing, Miss Rose?”

  “I am doing nothing at all,” said Katherine with great satisfaction.

  “You sound so proud of it,” Charles said. “It must be a rare event in your life.”

  “That’s true enough,” said Jack, who was now packing up his gear. “She can’t even seem to sit beside the fire in the evening without some task to hand. Mending or knitting or some such thing.”

  “And if I am, whose fault is that?” cried Katherine. “If some growing young lad would bother to tell his sister he was outgrowing his socks before she sent him six brand new pair that were now too small for him, I might have more occasion to sit idly.”

  Jack toed the ground. “I forgot,” he mumbled. “Will I ever be allowed to hear the last of it?”

  “And then, to trade those socks that his sister slaved over – for cakes!” added Katherine.

  “To be fair,” Han pointed out, “they were quite excellent cakes.”

  “And how does that benefit me?” Katherine challenged. “Was I given any of those excellent cakes?”

  “Should I have saved you some?” asked Jack, appalled. “I would have had to post them or bring them home after term, and they would have been most dreadfully stale.”

  Katherine couldn’t help laughing. She leaned back against the tree trunk and laughed and laughed. When she could speak again, she said, “No, you idiotish boy, I don’t want cakes. I want you to inform your poor sister of things she needs to know, like the expanding size of your feet.”

  “From now on,” Jack vowed, “I will measure them every week and send you a report on them.”

  “Not just your feet,” Katherine advised. “Let me know when any item of apparel becomes tight or too short. You’re growing like a weed now, and I don’t want you looking like a ragamuffin.”

  Han gave a crack of laughter. “Too late,” he said. “You should have said something before Footer fell into the river.”

  Indeed, Jack did have a bedraggled look about him. No one would know from his appearance that he was one of the county’s most prominent estate holders. Jack just grinned. He held up his creel and said, “Yet I’ve caught our dinner, and clothes may be washed.” He waved Han to his feet. “Come on, Inky, let’s take these to Mrs. Gage. She appreciates me. And she was speaking this morning
about making a cake.”

  The two boys ran off. Watching them go, Katherine said thoughtfully, “And yet Cook adores him. If I tried to enter the kitchen with those muddy shoes, I think Mrs. Gage would deny me admittance.”

  “Han has been ingratiating himself to my Mrs. Spelling,” Charles said. “Boys always seem to know how to get around cooks.” He stood and dusted himself up, and leaned down to give Katherine a hand. “Shall I help you mount?” he suggested.

  “If you would be so kind,” she replied. They went to Daisy and Charles interlaced his fingers to give Katherine a step up. Once she had settled herself into her saddle, he mounted his own horse. As Katherine turned her mount toward home, Charles rode beside her.

  “When you dismounted, how had you intended to remount?” he asked. “You couldn’t have foreseen that I would be along, and the boys are rather small for the office.”

  She pointed with her crop to the fence running beside them. “That stile right there makes a fine mounting block,” she said.

  “Ah, very foresighted of you.”

  They rode in silence for several minutes. Then Katherine asked, “How are you enjoying Dorset?”

  Charles grinned. “It’s all that I imagined, and everything I wanted. A place of my own, an opportunity to build things rather than tear them down. It’s what I dreamed of all the years at war.”

  “Indeed!” said Katherine, surprised.

  “I suppose I should say, the later years,” he added conscientiously. “I was just a boy when I joined and wild with the excitement of it all. The first several years I mainly concerned myself with staying alive.”

  “Always a priority,” Katherine agreed.

  “But now I want merely to enjoy the peace,” Charles said. He looked at his companion. “And what of you, Miss Rose? Do you ever crave excitement?”

  Katherine considered the matter gravely. “No,” she said at last. “I think not. Excitement certainly sounds well enough when encountered between the covers of a book. But I think that if one experienced it oneself, being cold and hungry and frightened and in danger would make one feel more miserable than excited.”

  He gave her a quizzical look. “If I mentioned excitement to most ladies, I doubt if their minds would go immediately to adventure and danger. Excitement to them would mean London, balls and parties, Almack’s and Vauxhall Gardens, the excitement of the social whirl.”

  “Oh, I see,” said Katherine, blushing slightly. “I can’t say I crave the London social scene. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I am no ascetic. I enjoy the assemblies at Doncaster, and having a pretty new dress. I greatly enjoy dancing and visiting with friends, that sort of thing.”

  “Wouldn’t London be more of ‘that sort of thing’?”

  “Too much more, I suspect,” Katherine said. “I have heard Lady Clara’s descriptions of London and I find the prospect of an evening crammed with three or more different parties to be appalling rather than appealing. Then too, the costs! I can admire a fashionable gown in the London periodicals, but then I feel almost angry when I read the cost of the gown and realize that the cost of that one gown would replace several barn roofs. The waste seems to me almost disgraceful.” After a moment, she added, “I hope you don’t think I’m criticizing you or your friends.”

  “Not at all,” Charles assured her. “A most sensible outlook indeed.”

  To himself, he thought how entirely suited to be a vicar’s wife this little wren of a woman was. Then he realized that in her severe dark-green riding habit, she was quite a well-looking woman, though no one would call her fashionable.

  They were traveling through Rosebourne land now, and Charles asked Katherine questions about what crops were grown and why, displaying a degree of sense and level of knowledge that left her unwillingly impressed. He was, she though, going to be a good landlord. So many noble landlords saw their holdings as merely sources of revenue, to the long-term detriment of the property and tenants.

  “You sound knowledgeable,” she told him.

  “I have a good steward,” he admitted.

  “Indeed you do. We think highly of Mister Doakes here.”

  Another silence fell; neither party felt the need to rush into speech. After a few moments, Charles offered, “You ride well.”

  Katherine chuckled. “Do I? How can you tell at this pace?”

  Charles thought about that; he’d never analyzed the matter before. “Your confidence is obvious,” he finally offered.

  “Ah, but does confidence denote skill?” Katherine parried. “It might merely indicate ignorance of my own incompetence.”

  Charles laughed at that. “Not incompetence. I’ve evaluated enough new subalterns to know that much.”

  “A subaltern!” exclaimed Katherine. “What a flattering comparison.”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t think.”

  “Don’t be sorry, and don’t alter your speech on my account,” Katherine told him. “Too many gentlemen think that women are too delicate for a genuine conversation; it makes any interaction with them artificial.”

  “You don’t resent being compared to a subaltern?” Charles asked, wanting to make certain.

  “No indeed,” Katherine told him. “I only fear I could not live up to it. I’ve never fired a gun, for one thing.”

  “Some of them hadn’t either,” Charles said gloomily. “At least they shot as if that was the case.”

  “I’m sure you soon had them sorted out,” Katherine said.

  “Oh, I sorted them out, all right,” he replied. He looked up. They had arrived at Rosebourne. “Ah. I seem to have escorted you home.”

  “Wasn’t that your intent?”

  “I was just out riding with no particular intent,” he admitted.

  “Won’t you come in? For tea, or we can offer you a glass of wine.”

  “No, thank you, I’ll just be on my way.” He lifted his hat to her and rode off down the lane.

  Unfortunately, the entire episode had been witnessed from an upstairs window by Helen. As Katherine entered the house, Helen came flying down the stairs.

  “That was Lord Charles!” she said. “Why didn’t you invite him in?”

  “I did invite him to come in,” Katherine said. “He chose not to.”

  Helen gasped. “I see what it is! You’re after Lord Charles yourself, you sly thing!”

  “Don’t talk such nonsense,” Katherine snapped. “We met by merest chance. I fancied a ride, I found the boys fishing the stream and stopped with them a while, and Lord Charles happened to ride by. That’s all there was to it. Riding back with me was a simple courtesy.”

  “Oh,” said Helen. After a moment, she added generously, “If someone must have Lord Charles, I’d far rather it be you than Julia. She’s gotten so above herself it’s insupportable. Evelyn tells me she caught her the other day, practicing signing her name ‘Lady Charles’. She’s certain she has him.”

  “She shouldn’t be so sure of that,” Katherine said, as they went up the stairs. She was thinking of the jolly girl who would soon be among them.

  “Why not?” asked Helen.

  Katherine was momentarily at a loss, not wanting to repeat Lady Clara’s confidences. So she said, “Because she has offended Lord Charles’ older sister, and older sisters, let me tell you, are powerful and awful creatures.”

  Helen giggled. “Indeed they are,” she said.

  At the dinner table at Greymere that evening, Han offered, “I quite like Miss Katherine Rose. She’s restful.”

  “Restful?” exclaimed Clara. “Is that a good thing?”

  “She is rather restful, now that you mention it,” Charles said. “But I’m not sure precisely why.”

  “She doesn’t feel the urgent need to fill every silence,” Han said.

  Thinking back to their ride together, Charles realized that this was so. He also realized that the ability to remain comfortably silent was quite soothing.

  “Silence?” asked Clara, in the tone of one being introd
uced to an unfamiliar concept.

  Charles chuckled, and Hector leaned over to pat his wife’s hand. “Never mind, m’dear,” he said.

  It was late the next morning that carriage wheels were heard on the gravel drive outside. Clara leaped to her feet and dashed to the window. “That must be her,” she said. “Indeed, it is!” And she flew down the steps to the front door. Charles, who’d been dealing with correspondence after breakfast, followed her at a more leisurely pace.

  He found a post-chaise pulled up at the front. A tiny vivid creature in a cherry red carriage gown and a crushed bonnet leaped out without assistance and gave Lady Clara a vigorous hug.

  “Thank you, thank you, for rescuing me from Bath!” the pixie exclaimed. “I’d acquired a suitor, a retired general, mind you, and was quite at my wit’s end. A trip to the country suits me admirably.”

  “Mandy, you absurd thing,” Clara replied. “What have you done to your hat?”

  “I believe I sat on it,” Amanda said. She took off the offending garment and tossed it into a tree. “I hate hats,” she added.

  “Hate hats!” gasped Clara, appalled at this heresy.

  “It’s different for you,” Amanda said. “Hats love you. They want to cooperate with you. I’ve never yet had a hat that didn’t despise me and plot for my downfall.” She tucked her arm in Clara’s and the two women moved toward the door, still chattering. “And I understand that you are, how do they put it, going to present your lord with a token of your affection?”

  “I know!” crowed Clara. “Isn’t it absurd? Me a mother?”

  “I must be the godmother,” Amanda cautioned. “I won’t take no for an answer.”

  They had reached the foot of the steps and finally looked up. “Good God, is that Charles?” exclaimed Amanda, advancing up the stairs.

  “Who else would it be, goose?” asked Clara.

  “Charles! Gracious, when did you get so large?”

  Charles bent over her hand. “When did you get so tiny?” he replied.