by Balogh, Mary
All her spring flowers were blooming merrily out there, most notably the daffodils, her favorite flower in the world. But the weeds were thriving too. The poor flower beds had never been so neglected. And all because she was a coward and afraid to go out front. Yet she had to see him again sometime.
“Right, Snowball,” she said as she went to get her gardening tools and gloves. “Out we go. You can run around while I tackle the wilderness.”
Snowball rushed out as soon as Lydia opened the door. She dashed over to the fence that bordered the copse, did her business, and dashed back again, bringing with her a stick that looked incongruously big and heavy for her. She dropped it at Lydia’s feet outside the door, wagged her stub of a tail, and gazed up hopefully.
Lydia glanced across at the empty drive. Nothing and no one. She looked at the gardening things in her hands, winced as she saw the flower bed beneath the front window—it seemed even weedier without the barrier of a pane of glass—glanced back at her dog, and laughed. Why not? Good heavens, why not?
Snowball woofed her agreement.
“Just for a few minutes, though,” Lydia said. “I do have more important things to do, you know.”
She was down at the bottom of the garden ten minutes later, her back to the fence, throwing the stick yet again in a game Snowball never seemed to tire of, when she heard the unmistakable sound of clopping hooves. She darted a dismayed glance over her shoulder at the drive and saw no one riding down it. Her relief was short-lived, however. Major Westcott must have ridden into the village earlier while she was busy in the kitchen. He was returning now along the street, his horse’s head just coming into view around the bend.
Foolishly, Lydia turned sharply away and pretended she was so engrossed in the game that she had neither heard nor seen him. She willed him to sneak by without saying anything. He might be just as desirous of avoiding her as she was of avoiding him, after all.
Apparently he was not.
“Good morning, Mrs. Tavernor,” he called, his voice pleasant and cheerful, as it always was. Lydia looked around in feigned surprise while her dog abandoned the stick game in favor of the greater excitement of charging toward the fence, growling and baring her teeth and then barking as though she considered herself the equal of man and horse combined.
“Good morning, Snowball.”
“Oh,” Lydia said, all bright with false amazement. “Good morning, Major Westcott. I did not hear you coming. It is a beautiful day, is it not?” It was actually blustery and chilly. Clouds hung low with the promise of rain at any moment.
“I find every morning beautiful when I wake to the realization that I am still alive to enjoy it,” he said, touching the brim of his hat with his whip.
And it struck Lydia that she had done him an injustice by thinking of him as good-looking but not outstandingly handsome. Actually he looked nothing short of gorgeous astride his horse. And virile. And several times more powerful—and appealing—than he looked when he was not riding. Though even then … He sat there now with graceful ease, as though he and his horse were an indivisible unit.
Snowball was incensed by them.
“There is no doubting how you came by your name,” the major said, addressing the dog.
“She was a gray, bedraggled puppy with ragged, matted fur when Mrs. Elsinore found her squeaking and crying on the back step of the vicarage,” Lydia told him. “She was shooing the poor thing away when I happened to come into the kitchen. I believe a vagrant we had fed earlier must have abandoned her and left without her. She looked dreadful, but after I had fed her some milk and washed her and rubbed her dry with a towel, I discovered she was white and fluffy and eager to live and to wash my face with her little pink tongue. That was early spring two years ago, and the snowdrops in the garden were just coming into bloom. I thought she needed a pretty springlike name and called her Snowdrop for a day or two. But she looked far more like a snowball, so that is who she became.”
Far too much information, Lydia, she told herself. She rarely spoke at such length to anyone except perhaps her new friends. Certainly not to any man. But she had talked more than usual last week too when he had walked her home, she remembered. And in the end she had spoken far too much.
Isaiah had wanted her to find another home for the dog. He had not been a hard-hearted man—far from it—but he did not believe animals belonged inside a house. Definitely not his own. Lydia had defied his wishes for surely the only time in their married life.
Major Westcott looked intently at her as she spoke, and it was obvious to Lydia that today he was really seeing her. It was not a reassuring thought. She would far prefer to be invisible again. She could feel herself flushing.
“She has appointed herself your guardian and defender, then,” Major Westcott said, “out of gratitude for being taken in and loved.”
And oh. He smiled. Really it was just with his eyes and a slight lifting of the corners of his mouth. Not a full-on, dazzling smile. It did not matter. Her knees trembled anyway. Idiot woman.
“I have just been invited to a party in honor of Mr. Solway’s birthday tomorrow evening,” he said. “He will have reached the grand age of seventy, and his daughters consider it an occasion for celebration. One can only hope he will agree, since it is to be a surprise. Will you be there?”
“I will,” she told him. “I will be taking a cake I baked.”
“I will be walking there,” he said, “since Solway’s house is even closer to home than Tom and Hannah’s was last week. May I have the pleasure of escorting you home afterward, Mrs. Tavernor?”
Her first instinct was to refuse. Mr. Solway lived only a few houses along the street. Besides … It would be ungracious, though, to tell him his escort was unnecessary. He was looking steadily down at her, waiting for her answer, while his horse pawed the ground and snorted disdainfully at Snowball, who was still bouncing around on her side of the fence, defending her territory with the occasional warning growl. The horse did not otherwise move, however. Major Westcott had perfect control over it.
“Thank you,” Lydia said. “That would be very kind of you.”
He straightened in the saddle. “Until tomorrow evening, then,” he said. But instead of riding away immediately, he continued to look steadily at her, that half smile still softening his eyes and curving his lips. “What kind of cake?”
“Fruit,” she said. “With spices. And marzipan and icing.”
“I wish now I had not asked,” he said. “I may not be able to sleep tonight in anticipation.”
Lydia laughed in surprise at his answer and bit her lip as she stared after him while he rode off up the driveway to Hinsford Manor.
Why on earth did he want to escort her home tomorrow evening when the distance was really quite insignificant? It did not have anything to do with what she had said to him last week, did it? He was not … Oh, surely he was not thinking of taking her up on the offer she had not really made. He could not possibly … She could not possibly …
But he had looked very intently at her while they spoke.
He had said—as a joke—that he would not be able to sleep tonight in anticipation. Of eating a slice of her cake tomorrow, he had meant. But what about her—in all earnestness?
How was she supposed to sleep tonight?
Whenever Harry dared to believe that perhaps he had fully recovered at last from his war experiences, something could be relied upon to reveal to him that he had not. That perhaps he never would.
The old, annoying nightmares had returned with a vengeance during the past week, and he knew why. He had felt guilty about being essentially unaware of Mrs. Tavernor’s existence for the past four years although he had seen her at least once a week at church and had even spoken to her and exchanged pleasantries with her outside her cottage during the year or so she had been living there. She had been a nonentity to him. Yet he prided himself upon his courteous attention to other people—people of all social classes and both genders. Courtesy
should involve more than just amiable nods and smiles and rote comments upon the weather— and an essential unawareness of the other’s existence.
For years, however, he had deliberately and for his very sanity’s sake looked upon the French armies as one impersonal entity, to be obliterated from existence at every opportunity. He had never looked into the faces of individual French soldiers, either during battle or afterward, when large numbers of them lay strewn, dead, upon the ground between the armies.
Had he saved his sanity? Or had something been pushed so deep inside him that it would forever torment him?
In his nightmares he saw them. Sometimes they were still frighteningly faceless. Sometimes, even more frighteningly, they had the faces of his friends and family. Occasionally they had the face he saw whenever he looked into a mirror. He could go for days or weeks without those nightmares. And then … not.
He had thought that at least he had learned something from the ghastly experiences of war and from his own loss of status and identity. Concern, compassion for all. A conscious awareness of the existence and precious individuality of everyone he met. Yet unconsciously he had dismissed Mrs. Tavernor as someone not worthy of recognition as a human being.
Maybe because she was a woman? But no. In that at least he was surely being unfair to himself.
He would not absolve himself with that assurance, however. The fact that he loved his mother and sisters and female relatives did not necessarily prove that he saw all women as deserving of the same attention as men. And the fact that he had never totally ignored Mrs. Tavernor did not prove that he had therefore treated her as he ought. No woman was a mere appendage of her husband. No widow belonged in a shadow world.
Harry rode home, aware that he had looked fully and consciously at Mrs. Tavernor for the first time today. He had deliberately stopped to speak with her, though he might easily have avoided talking at all. He was well aware that she had seen him coming but had pretended not to. She had appeared flustered when he spoke to her and forced her to turn to him in feigned surprise. The poor woman had no doubt been consumed with embarrassment over the memory of what she had said to him so impulsively last week.
But he had wanted to look at her, to speak to her, to listen to her, even if it had meant embarrassing her. For if he had ridden past without speaking this time, an awkwardness would have been imposed upon all their future encounters.
She had looked rather pretty, though it was perhaps a bit shallow and condescending of him to notice that about her before all else. Would he have been less surprised by his lack of awareness of her in the past if he had discovered her to be plain? She had been wearing a blue dress, neither dowdy nor in the height of fashion, with a matching shawl about her shoulders to protect her against the chill of the day. She was slim and rather shapely. Her hair was chestnut brown, though he had not been able to see much of it beneath the white cap that covered her head and was tied neatly beneath her chin with narrow ribbons. Her cheeks had been flushed, her nose too in the cold, her eyes large with that pretend surprise, and somewhere between blue and gray in color. She had a wide, generous mouth, which did not seem quite to fit the rest of her face but nevertheless made it more pleasing.
It was actually surprising that he had scarcely noticed her until a week ago. She was a young, good-looking woman. Attractive, one might say. Why, then, had he not noticed her? He was as red-blooded a male as the next man. He noticed pretty women. Why had he not noticed her? Because she had been a married woman until fairly recently, and her husband had been a man of exceptionally forceful character and piety? But he noticed other pretty wives. Had she perhaps not wanted to be noticed? Had she been content to be the Reverend Isaiah Tavernor’s shadow? The vicar’s wife. The vicar’s helpmeet. He seemed to recall that Tavernor had always referred to her with that word, never as his wife. And never by name. Harry thought back to Mrs. Jenkins. She had perfectly fit her role as the vicar’s wife. Yet she had been unmistakably a person in her own right. The same could be said now of Mrs. Bailey.
Well, even if Mrs. Tavernor had kept herself deliberately in the shadows, Harry was not excused for not seeing her there. Especially as he had not really liked Tavernor. He ought to have looked more closely at the wife.
She had made him a proposition last week. And the memory of doing so had caused her acute embarrassment today. It would be as well to let the matter rest there, Harry thought. She regretted her words, and he had decided during the intervening days that it would not be a good idea to begin either a flirtation or an affair with her—or with anyone else from the neighborhood when, no matter how discreet they both were, word would inevitably get out and complicate both their lives and even perhaps trap them into a marriage neither of them wanted. One could not get away with sneezing in a village this size without at least half a dozen people who were nowhere in sight blessing one’s soul. To try engaging in a clandestine affair …
Well, it would be madness.
Why, then, had he asked if he might escort her home from Solway’s house tomorrow evening? Why was he even going to a birthday celebration he would normally have avoided? He did not attend every social function to which he was invited, after all. He tended to socialize more with his own class for the simple reason that he had more in common with them and was more comfortable with them— and they with him. He had gone to Tom and Hannah’s last week only because Tom had been his close friend for as far back as he could remember.
Had he accepted this invitation because it might give him an opportunity to see and talk to Mrs. Tavernor again? And good God, she did not need to be escorted home afterward. She lived only a stone’s throw away. But he had agreed to attend the party, and she was going to be there too, and she had consented to his taking her home.
He was not behaving rationally, Harry thought. It must be because his mind was weary from lack of sleep. He had better do some clear thinking between now and tomorrow evening, though. Talk sense into himself.
Mr. Solway was certainly surprised when a large crowd of his neighbors, having gathered first at the church, appeared all at once on the threshold of his house, all yelling, “Surprise!” in unison when his daughters answered the knock upon his door. Those near the front saw him first recoil in alarm, then shake his head and wag an admonishing finger at his daughters, and then smile with what looked like genuine delight as he spread his arms and beckoned everyone inside.
“If it is an old man you have come to commiserate with on his birthday,” he said, “you have come to the right place. I told my girls there was on no account to be any fuss made, but I might as well have saved what little breath is left me to blow on my tea. One’s children don’t pay any attention at all after one passes the age of seventy. Be warned. Come right on in so that those at the back don’t have to spend the evening out in the garden. Have you come too, Major Westcott?” He held out his right hand and beamed his pleasure. “This is an honor indeed.”
He shook Harry heartily by the hand, and Harry squeezed his shoulder with his free hand and wished him a happy birthday and hoped he would have many more. He was always touched when his neighbors treated him with the deference he might have expected if he had continued to be the Earl of Riverdale instead of being plain Harry Westcott, illegitimate son of the former earl.
It was a pleasant, merry evening. It began, after they were all inside and the older ones among them had been given chairs and the noisy greetings had subsided, with the Reverend Bailey offering a prayer of thanks for the seventy years upon this earth that Mr. Solway had enjoyed and asking a blessing upon the celebration and the years, however many of them the Lord had allotted, that lay ahead for each of them. Then a few of Solway’s contemporaries got to their feet one at a time and recounted generally funny stories of their younger years together. The church choir led a round of hymn singing, which was a little ragged without the musical accompaniment Mrs. Bailey always provided at church but was nevertheless hearty. Solway’s grandchildren, who were in atte
ndance despite the fact that several of them would be up well past their bedtime, got under everyone’s feet and upon more than one nerve. And finally everyone feasted upon the savories and dainties Solway’s daughters had prepared in lavish abundance and kept hidden from their father until the party was no longer a secret and everything could be loaded upon the table after two extra leaves had been added.
The birthday cake, elaborately iced, took pride of place at the center of the table. Yet Mrs. Tavernor kept very quiet about it while the guests exclaimed upon how beautiful it looked and what a pity it was that it had to be cut, and then upon how delicious it tasted, so moist and fruit filled and richly spiced, and was it not a good thing it had been cut and not merely kept as a decoration? Harry noticed because he had been particularly watching her—and because he knew that it was she who had made the cake. Her demeanor of quiet modesty was deliberately assumed, he noticed. Even when Mrs. Franks, one of Solway’s daughters, announced that it was Mrs. Tavernor who had baked and iced the cake and thanked her for it, she did no more than half smile before ducking out of sight. As a consequence, Mrs. Franks’s announcement went largely unnoticed. Most would remember the cake tomorrow. How many would also remember that their former vicar’s wife had made it?
Perhaps, then, Harry thought, it was not entirely his fault that he had never taken particular notice of her either until just over a week ago. It seemed that she really did not want to be noticed. That was strange. Most people surely wanted to be seen and recognized and acknowledged. Her late husband, the Reverend Isaiah Tavernor, had always been noticed wherever he went.
Had it been the attraction of opposites with those two?
“A penny for them, Harry, my lad?” Tom Corning slapped a hand on his shoulder. “You look as if your mind is a million miles away. Which may not be a bad thing. It may be less congested there than it is here. Can you imagine living for seventy years?”