Katherine, When She Smiled

by Harmon, Joyce

  “We shall see,” Katherine said.

  “Miss Mason!” The vicar entered the vicarage drawing room to greet his guest. “Have you been waiting long?”

  Amanda smiled at Mister Downey. “A few minutes only. I accompanied the wagons bringing back the tables we borrowed. I thought I should visit you.”

  “Always welcome,” Downey said, taking a seat uneasily. He wondered what the lively young lady was up to.

  “The Fernleys’ visit is coming to a close,” Amanda told him. “They will be returned to their own home in just two days.”

  “Ah,” said Downey. “Well, pleasant journey.”

  “Oh, I’m not leaving,” Amanda said.

  “Not leaving.” The vicar blinked. “Surely you cannot remain at Greymere once Lord Charles’ sister has departed.”

  “No, you’re right,” Amanda said. “I won’t stay at Greymere. But I so adore Piddledean I decided I couldn’t bear to leave it.”

  Downey pondered this conundrum for a moment. “Did you find a cottage available for hire?” he asked at last. “I know how you admired our cottages.”

  “No,” Amanda said sadly. “No one was willing to abandon a cottage for me.”

  “So?” Downey prompted.

  She beamed at him. “So I thought I would stay here.”

  “Miss Mason!” The vicar jumped to his feet, outraged.

  “That’s my name,” she told him imperturbably.

  “You can’t stay here! The complete impropriety of the notion should be obvious to you.”

  Amanda’s eyes widened. “Mister Downey! What must you think me capable of! It would be completely proper for me to stay at the vicarage.”

  “It would?” Downey wondered if the lively miss had gone mad.

  “Why, of course it would!” Amanda told him. “Once we’re married, where else would I stay?”

  “Once…” the vicar sat down again, stunned. “What on earth do you mean? Miss Mason, are you proposing to me?”

  Amanda sighed. “Perhaps I must, though I had rather hoped that you would propose to me.”

  “Propose to you? I can’t imagine a lady more unsuitable to be a vicar’s wife! And to suggest marriage in order to remain in a particular place is outrageous.”

  Amanda laughed. “Oh, you great silly creature! Of course I love Piddledean, but I wouldn’t marry just anyone in order to remain. As for unsuitable, who could be a more suitable vicar’s wife than the lady who adores the vicar?”

  Mister Downey proceeded to give Miss Mason an assessment of her character as unflattering as it was accurate. She would have been most cast down had he not taken her in his arms as he spoke. After a few moments of this, the vicar resolutely unhanded the young lady and said severely, “You needn’t think you can remain in the vicarage before we are married.”

  “So we are getting married?” Amanda asked, to be certain.

  Downey sighed heavily. “I suppose that we must, for who else could tolerate you?”

  “Such a brave man,” she marveled, “and so dedicated! But I suppose you’re right – I must go away. But only for a while. Just until we can get married with all propriety. And then, what fun we shall have!”

  The very notion of marriage as fun struck the vicar as slightly improper, but rather than correct her, he found himself kissing her again.

  That evening, the party at Greymere noted that Miss Mason had about her an air of suppressed excitement. At the dinner table, she told the Fernleys she would accompany them home. “For a little while, at least,” she said with a smile.

  “Splendid,” Lady Clara said. Perhaps her scheme for Charles’ establishment hadn’t worked out immediately, but with Mandy reestablished in the Ramsey circle of friends, it was still a possibility.

  Han looked up from his slice of partridge to observe, “Lot of secrets at the table tonight.”

  Charles shot him a suspicious look, but Han had nothing more to add. The dinner conversation was monopolized by Captain Fernley, voluble for once, expounding on the difficulties involved in sealing old tunnels.

  When the ladies left the dining table, Han rose as well, to return to his sketching. Before he left, he said to Charles, “I suppose I must congratulate you on getting over your fear of clever women.” He left smiling, leaving Charles with the consolation that at least his own particular clever woman did not come with an omniscient brother.

  The day after his meeting with Katherine that sealed their engagement, Charles had written two letters, to his mother, informing her of his impending change in status, and to Jenkins the librarian, summoning him to Greymere. He expected Jenkins any time, and was not surprised that morning to see a coach rolling down the drive. He was surprised, however, to see that it was his brother’s best traveling carriage.

  “Jenkins travels in style,” he observed, rising from the breakfast table and heading through the hall to meet the nervous little man.

  But as he descended the steps, he saw that Jenkins leaped lightly from the carriage, and then turned to assist another passenger down, and the other passenger was none other than the Dowager Duchess of Winton. His mother had barely attained the pavement before she launched into a bitter tirade against odiously independent young men who thought they could cavalierly enter into engagements with young women that their mamas had never even met.

  Charles laughed and kissed her. “Blame the war,” he said, “for convincing so many of us that we could survive without our mamas.”

  “We shall see about that,” the Dowager said grimly.

  And yet, once she had descended unannounced in all her awful majesty onto the Rose family and made the acquaintance of her son’s intended, she did a complete about face, telling Charles that he had done much better about the business than she might have expected. And when she learned that her prospective daughter-in-law was actually none other than Mrs. Wilson, her admiration was without limit, Mrs. Wilson being a particular favorite of hers.

  She demanded the earliest possible copy of the upcoming novel and similar consideration on future novels.

  Charles reminded her, “Don’t expect more Mrs. Wilson novels after the one which will soon be issued. Recall that Miss Rose was financially compelled to write, and now that Jenkins has found the family library to be so valuable, that motivation no longer applies.”

  “No Mrs. Wilson novels!” exclaimed the Dowager. “Charles, you must make her!”

  “I will do no such thing,” Charles said severely. “My wife will do what she pleases.”

  And so it seemed that Mrs. Wilson was dead.

  A week later, Charles and Katherine rode along the country lanes around Piddledean. They discussed the upcoming London auction that Mister Jenkins was arranging for items from the Rose family library. Jenkins was certain that the auction, which was already engendering a certain amount of excitement in book collecting circles, would garner well over the thirty thousand pounds needed to bring the Rose estate back to comfortable circumstances.

  “Who could have imagined that those old books would be the solution to our problems?” Katherine marveled. “It certainly never occurred to me, and it obviously never dawned on Papa, because he wasn’t keeping those books out of affection or sentiment; I’m sure he never gave two thoughts to any book that didn’t deal with the ancient Greeks.”

  “And there they sat, quietly valuable,” Charles said smugly. “Until I came along.”

  “Indeed, you can be proud of yourself,” Katherine conceded. Then she laughed. “Only think of what Mrs. Wilson might make of such material. A valuable book,” she said musingly. “A book that no one knew was valuable. Except of course for a certain scoundrel…”

  “Wait!” Charles said, “now I’m a scoundrel?”

  “Oh, not you, but there might be a scoundrel,” Katherine said.

  Charles looked at her curiously. “I thought you were relieved to be rid of Mrs. Wilson.”

  “I suppose I am,” Katherine said. “Oh, of course I am. I hated feeling c
ompelled to write for the family’s welfare. And then there was the constraint of having to use the characters and situations that Papa had already invented. But still, there were moments when the way suddenly became clear, and that part of it was enjoyable.”

  They rode in silence for a few moments, and then Katherine said dreamily, “Is it the book itself that is valuable, or is there something valuable in the book? A map, perhaps, or a will?”

  “What book?” Charles asked.

  “The book I’ve just invented,” Katherine explained. She stared off into space, a slight smile on her lips. “The heroine can’t read the book. It’s in a foreign language. Or perhaps it’s in code. What do you think?”

  She looked at Charles inquiringly. And while it was Katherine riding beside him, Charles suddenly realized that he was looking at Mrs. Wilson.

  “I think that’s entirely up to you,” he said.

  EPILOGUE

  In later years, it became accepted fact among the residents of Piddledean that it was the arrival of Lord Charles Ramsey among them that ushered in a golden age for news and conversation such as the village had never seen before or since. Lord Charles himself might not have been the performer of all the newsworthy actions, but the interesting times certainly dated from his arrival.

  Long-lost caves were rediscovered just in time to create havoc at a simple, though lavish, picnic. Young ladies took to sliding along floors in their stocking feet. And of particular note were three weddings among the local gentry that provided the village with gossip fodder for years to come.

  The first of these weddings was the vicar’s scandalously hasty marriage to Miss Mason, a young lady of independent means and independent mind whom he had know for a matter of scant weeks. Opinion was sharply divided on the matter, with Mrs. Worth saying sadly that she hated to have to call the vicar’s wife a minx.

  “Then don’t do so,” Mrs. Shelby told her bluntly over the teacups. “No one forces you to.”

  “And yet,” sighed Mrs. Worth, “her bold manners and the pertness of her comments…”

  “Mrs. Downey speaks her mind,” insisted her advocate Mrs. Shelby, “and if that is a sin, then I see someone right at this table, Sally Worth, who might find the afterlife a great deal hotter than she anticipated!”

  “Well!” exclaimed Mrs. Worth, the only other occupant of the table. “If that is your opinion!” She stood hastily and took leave of her friend, so incensed that she didn’t speak to her again for almost a day.

  Mrs. Downey threw herself whole-heartedly into the life of the parish, and quite soon her advocates outnumbered her detractors by a considerable amount, though some found her concerns for the least fortunate among her husband’s parishioners to be almost unseemly in a lady of quality. But she certainly gave the village topics for conversation and continued to do so for the rest of her life. Once she even kissed her husband on the front steps of the vicarage!

  The second marriage of note was that of the squire’s eldest to her London beau, and some saw it almost providential that a girl who’d dreamed of living in Town all her life should have a London gentleman neatly delivered almost to her doorstep, handy for the taking.

  Yes, Mister Grimthorpe could be described as ‘in trade’, but at least the business of publishing was a respectable calling, and it wasn’t as if, Mrs. Shelby reminded Mrs. Worth, Mister Grimthorpe kept a shop or anything so vulgar as that.

  From the moment the Grimthorpe ring slipped onto her finger, Basil Grimthorpe became Julia’s ‘darling Uncle Basil’. Old Basil found his final years to be quite comfortable ones, with his niece by marriage determined to pamper the old fellow at every conceivable opportunity. Yet even the most pampered and cosseted old gentleman cannot live forever, and when in the fullness of time, Basil Grimthorpe went to meet his maker, the earthly goods he left behind came into the possession of his beloved nephew Rupert, and Julia could congratulate herself that her labors were not in vain.

  With the Grimthorpe fortune in his possession, Rupert was able to leave Mulberry and Hawes and the taint of having to work for a living, and Julia’s quest to become the properest matron in London society was realized. Julia’s occasional visits to her parents, accompanied by her interesting children and trunks of sumptuous clothing, afforded great nourishment to village conversation.

  But by far the most intriguing and satisfying marriage of all was that of Lord Charles himself. Lord Charles honored what Piddledean considered an implicit bargain by marrying one of their own, and those ill-natured enough to speak pityingly of Miss Katherine Rose’s ‘jilting’ by the vicar were at least momentarily chagrined into silence.

  Lord Charles and Katherine married soon after the New Year, when the Roses’ year of mourning was over. Marriage suited Miss Katherine, or Lady Charles, as the Piddledean gossips loved to call her. She smiled more, and often was even heard to laugh.

  How the story slipped out, no one could say, but it soon became quietly known among the residents of Piddledean that Lady Charles was also Mrs. Wilson the novelist. This item was so delicious that it never occurred to anyone to do the figuring and realize that the first Mrs. Wilson novel was published when Katherine Rose was fourteen years old.

  Like most villages, Piddledean did not share local secrets with outsiders, so the secret of Mrs. Wilson’s identity, spoken in whispers amongst themselves, never reached the wider world, and Lady Charles’ privacy was ensured.

  As for Mrs. Wilson herself, that redoubtable lady turned out not to be dead at all. The tradition of the annual novel was not maintained, but every two or three years, Lady Charles would get a dreamy look on her face and begin asking unanswerable questions that all began “What if…?”, and her patient husband would recognize that Mrs. Wilson had surfaced again.

  He likened the experience to the occasional visit of a mother-in-law who would descend upon you without warning, remain for months, and demand all your wife’s attention for the interim. It was the price he paid, he said, for marrying a clever woman.

  In later years, Greymere possessed two works by that noted artist Hannibal Cooper. The drawing room was graced by a large oil portrait of Lady Charles in a garden with her two young sons. This artwork was extraordinary enough, since Cooper was known to shun portraiture and especially disparaged society portraits. The Lady Charles Ramsey portrait was one of the very few portraits he ever executed and was a testament to his lifelong friendship with that family.

  But Lord Charles was known to say that this portrait, valuable as it was, was second in value to the other Cooper work in his possession. This piece, displayed in his lordship’s dressing room, was a mere sketch, tore from a sketch book and framed, and depicted Lady Charles, or Miss Katherine Rose as she then was, riding a horse with a slight smile on her face.

  Lord Charles liked to say that it was the first time he saw Katherine. Those in the know would protest that Charles’ first meeting with Katherine involved a collision on a stair, but Charles insisted that the sketch was the first time he really saw her.

  Not even the most avowed pessimist could pretend that the marriage of Lord Charles Ramsey and Miss Katherine Rose was anything but a happy one, one of those rare occasions when young men and women found a mate similar enough to be compatible and different enough to be interesting and amiable enough to either tolerate or share one’s favorite quirks.

  One quirk they had in common was the tendency to meet sometimes in the front hall after the household had gone to bed, and to remove their shoes and glide in stockinged feet upon the floor. It was a sport they both relished, and they both claimed to be the best at it. Katherine was certain that she was the best, since Lord Charles had a tendency to collide with her.

  And yet, since Lord Charles was quite a graceful young athlete, and the collisions were the occasion for a great deal of laughter and grasping at one another, one might perhaps form the suspicion that most of these collisions were deliberate.

  THE END

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

>   Joyce Harmon has been from one side of the galaxy to the other (slight exaggeration) and seen a lot of strange stuff (very true). Since retiring from the Navy, she has worked as a winery tour guide, a journalist for a local newspaper, selling collectibles on eBay, and making candles - and always, always, a writer. She shares her rural Virginia home with two haughty and indolent cats and one clever, busy dog, and is haunted by a noisy crowd of characters, all clamoring to be written down and set loose into the world. She accommodates them as quickly as she can. She is the author of the Passatonnack Winery mysteries, Died On The Vine and Bidding On Death. A Feather To Fly With is her first Regency romance, followed by Regency Road Trip, The World’s A Stage and her new release Katherine, When She Smiled.

  Joyce blogs occasionally at http://joyceharmon.wordpress.com/ , mostly about her dog.

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