by Balogh, Mary
“Since they are ginger, my favorite, I will,” he said, putting two on his plate. “Did you really make them just for me?”
“I did.” Lydia fetched the coffeepot and filled his mug again. “Because you had come here to chop wood just for me.”
Was that a fond look he just gave her? If it was, it passed too quickly for her to be sure. “Camille is older than I am,” he told her when she sat back down. “She used to be the most stuffy, self-righteous, joyless person you could possibly imagine, and she was betrothed to a man who was all those things and more. He dropped her after what my family refers to as the Great Disaster—capital letters, I would have you know. She is now married to an artist and school-teacher, and they live in a big house in the hills above Bath, running a sort of artists’ school, live-in retreat from the world, performance center, party venue, name it what you will. They have nine children, six of them adopted, three of their own. Camille always looks ever so slightly disheveled and has a tendency to go about barefoot with a child astride one of her hips. The latest adoptees are twin baby girls whom no one else was willing to adopt together. She is as happy as it is possible to be. And more vividly beautiful than she ever was before, I might add. Joel, her husband, is equally happy. If what happened to us was a catastrophe, then it worked out remarkably well for my elder sister.”
Lydia smiled. How wonderful Camille’s life sounded. Chaotic, perhaps, but also wonderfully … giving. And it sounded as if she must have a close partnership with her husband.
“And the younger of your sisters?” she asked. “Is she younger than you?”
“Abigail. Yes,” he said. “I am in the middle. Abby married my fellow officer and closest friend in the church here shortly before the old vicar retired and you came with your husband to take his place. It was a marriage of convenience made in haste to enable Gil to get his daughter back from her grandparents, who had taken her just before his first wife’s death while he was away, fighting at the Battle of Waterloo. They were refusing to give her back. The marriage quickly turned into what is now very obviously a love match. They have two sons of their own in addition to Katy, the daughter for whose sake they married. They live in Gloucestershire, where Gil has turned, quite improbably, into a farmer. Abby informed me while I was visiting them after Christmas that she considers her life as close to perfect as it is possible to be. I believe her.” He paused in thought for a moment. “I cannot say I have always considered it lovely to have sisters. I often thought them the world’s worst pests when we were growing up. But I am extremely fond of them now.”
He took another biscuit off the plate. “These are exceedingly good,” he said. “You really need to hide the rest of them, Lydia, or at least move the plate out of my reach.”
Instead she pushed it a little closer to him, and they both laughed.
“Temptress,” he said, but he took yet another before he got to his feet, scraping his chair back over the stone flags of the kitchen floor as he did so. “I must go outside and tidy up and then bring in some wood for your wood box. I see it is almost empty. I will need to get going then. I have promised to accompany my steward to the home farm this afternoon to adjudicate a dispute over whether we need an additional barn or a mere extension to the existing one. I have a hard life, Lydia.”
“You do not need to do anything more here,” she assured him. “You have already done a great deal.”
But he smiled at her and did it anyway. By the time she had cleared the table and washed up their few dishes, all was neat and tidy beyond the window, and he was approaching the house with an armful of wood. She held the back door open as he carried it inside, and then she hovered in the kitchen while he washed up outside again, drew on his coat, and came back to take his leave.
“I do not know how to thank you,” she told him.
“You already did,” he said. “The toast and cheese were just what I needed, and your ginger biscuits are delicious. And you are going to knit me a scarf. But no hat. Please.”
“I promise.” She smiled back at him. “Thank you, Harry.”
He stood just inside the back door, ready to take his leave. Snowball was sniffing his boots. There was a moment when he might have left without further ado, but he hesitated that moment too long and ended up setting his hands on her shoulders instead and brushing the sides of his thumbs along her jaw.
“Shall I return this evening?” he asked her, his voice suddenly low and husky, his eyes very direct on hers.
She felt her smile drain away as she swallowed and licked her lips. Say no. This must not go any further. Say no.
“If you wish,” she said.
“I rather believe I do,” he told her, and his eyes held hers before dipping to look at her lips. He tipped his head slightly sideways and drew her a little closer. Her heart felt as if it were about to beat right out of her chest—and her ears. He looked into her eyes again and then shut his own as he closed the distance between their mouths.
It was a soft, light kiss with closed mouths and no attempt to make anything more sensual of it. A kiss of friends? Lydia felt it all the way down through her insides to her toes as she set her hands on either side of his waist.
Then he was looking back into her eyes, his hands still lightly clasping her shoulders.
“Sometime soon,” he said, “perhaps this evening, I will kiss you properly, Lydia. Or perhaps, in the spirit of independence, you will kiss me.”
It seemed strange that last evening when he had asked her to invite him inside and she had tacitly agreed by leaving the gate open and not looking back, she had expected to go to bed with him. Yet now she felt everything was moving along much too fast. He was so much more … masculine than she had expected. So much more … real. And so much … lovelier. And oh goodness, what had happened to her vocabulary? He was so very … likable. What a very weak word.
But could she bear having this man as a lover? When she had conceived the idea, it had been entirely in the realm of dreams. She had wanted a balm to the ache of loneliness that seemed to be a part of her very being. She had wanted something to bring some vividness into her life. She had wanted to live at long last. Yet the dream had been essentially impersonal, perhaps because she had known it stood little to no chance of coming true. She had not known how, in the world of reality, she would feel in his company or when he spoke to her and smiled at her. And touched her and kissed her. It had not occurred to her that the reality would so far exceed the dream that she would be unable to cope with it. How could she have known? She had done so little living despite the fact that she was twenty-eight years old and a widow. Almost all her living so far had been done in the interior world of her dreams.
Could she bear to step beyond dreams into reality?
She was terribly afraid that something would be irrevocably lost if they did become lovers—not only this specific dream but her ability to dream at all. And the tentative friendship that seemed to be growing between them would be lost too, this mutual sympathy and understanding. This very precious something she had never known before with either a woman or a man.
Oh, she had opened some sort of Pandora’s box a little over a week ago and had no idea what she had unleashed.
“Perhaps,” she said. Perhaps she would let him kiss her tonight, she meant. Perhaps she would kiss him, though that at least seemed unlikely. She would not know how to go about it—strangely, when she had been married for six years.
She liked his grin. It came slowly now. It was so much more boyish than a simple smile. It set his eyes alight and showed just where laugh lines would settle into their outer corners as permanent wrinkles when he grew older.
“Until this evening, then,” he said, releasing her and turning to the doorway. “Snowball, why are you growling now of all times? I am leaving.”
“I think it must be for that very reason,” Lydia said. “She is sorry to see you go.”
“I have made a conquest of at least one of the ladies in this house, th
en?” he said. “And, heaven help me, it is the dog.”
Lydia laughed as he stepped outside and strode around the corner of the house on his way out. She hoped very much that no one would see him cross the road. Had anyone heard the axe all morning? It would surely have been very obvious to anyone who had that she was not the one doing all that chopping.
She wandered outside to eye the neat pile of chopped wood with satisfaction and stooped to pick up one small stick he had missed when tidying. It was as she was straightening up that Snowball began dashing along the line of the back fence again, yapping. Two hands clutched the top of it, and a head from the nose up appeared between them, peering over and down at the woodpile.
Both face and hands disappeared in a hurry. But they did not vanish before she had identified the intruder.
Jeremy Piper.
Annoyance at his cheekiness, however, was soon replaced by a feeling of enormous relief that he had not come slinking by any earlier. Five minutes ago, for example, when she had been standing just inside the open door being kissed by Harry Westcott.
Take warning, Lydia. Oh, take warning. You are playing with a terrible danger.
Seven
By the time Harry returned from the farm late in the afternoon, having settled the dispute over the barn by suggesting that repairs be made to the loft to allow for more storage space and agreeing to an addition larger than originally suggested being added to the back of the building to make more room for the livestock, he felt both sticky and grimy and sent word to his valet to prepare a bath for him. While he waited for the water to be heated and carried up to his dressing room, he went into the library to look through the day’s mail.
There were two personal letters, one from his cousin Jessica, whom he had not seen since her marriage two years ago to Gabriel, Earl of Lyndale. He had been present for their wedding when, quite coincidentally, he had been making one of his rare visits to London to be measured for a new coat and boots after his valet had warned him that the old ones would simply fall off from sheer old age one of these days. The other letter was from Aunt Matilda, Viscountess Dirkson, his father’s eldest sister. He sat down behind his desk to read.
Jessica’s letter was full of enthusiastic descriptions of her life in the north of England. She was a few years younger than Harry. She and Abigail had always been very close friends. As essentially an only child—Avery, Duke of Netherby, her half brother, was years older—Jessica had always adored all three of her cousins, and they had been dearly fond of her. One paragraph of her letter was devoted to details about Evan, her one-year-old son. They were going to London soon for the parliamentary session and the Season, she reported. Was Harry going to be there too? Jessica hoped so. She had missed seeing him at Christmas.
He had missed her too, Harry thought as he folded the letter and set it aside. And the rest of the Westcott family also, much as he had been relieved not to have to go to Brambledean for Christmas. But no, he was not going to London. Not this year. He knew what would almost surely be awaiting him there if he did—thirtieth birthday celebrations, for example. No, thank you, Jessica, he thought.
Aunt Matilda and Viscount Dirkson, her husband of four years, had just been on a visit to Gloucestershire to see three of their grandchildren, whom they had missed dreadfully over Christmas, though it was perfectly understandable that Abigail and Gil had wanted to spend the holiday in Bath. Gil Bennington was Viscount Dirkson’s natural son. The two had been estranged through most of Gil’s life until a few years ago but had edged warily about each other for a while after Abby and Gil’s wedding and during the court case over the custody of Katy. Father and son seemed now to be cautiously fond of each other, due in large part to the influence of Abby on the one side and Aunt Matilda on the other, Harry suspected.
Everyone was well and thriving, his aunt reported, though of course Harry would know that since he had seen them all for himself very recently. Both fond grandparents— and totally unbiased, of course, Harry—were agreed that Ben was the most gorgeous baby ever, while Seth was the most gorgeous infant and Katy the loveliest little girl. Harry chuckled. Aunt Matilda had married late in life and was very obviously extremely happy. Even exuberant. Who could ever have predicted it?
Marital happiness really was possible, he thought. His mother had been quite right about that. The Westcotts seemed particularly good at it. Why, then, was he contemplating an affair that was not going to lead to marriage and would be risky besides, to say the least, given the size of the village and the fact that everyone in it and for miles around knew everyone else’s business almost before the everyone else in question knew it themselves? Why was he going to see Lydia Tavernor tonight with a view, he supposed, to having an affair with her sometime in the foreseeable future, when he could simply go to London and find a wife? Surely if he set his mind to it he could find someone to suit him.
The inevitable question came in the next to final paragraph of his aunt’s letter. Was Harry planning to spend at least a part of the Season in town this spring? Harry spread one hand over his eyes and laughed. For it was obvious now that this was a concerted family campaign. First his mother at Christmas, and Cam and Abby to a lesser degree. Then his mother again after his return home. And now his cousin and his aunt. It would be his grandmother next, he could confidently predict, and then his other aunts. Maybe Alexander or Wren. And Elizabeth, Alex’s sister. Had he missed anyone? Ah. And possibly Anna, his own half sister.
Harry folded Aunt Matilda’s letter and set it on top of Jessica’s. He was not going to London, no matter how often they asked. Sometimes being a Westcott was a massive pain. But he smiled even as he thought it. He would never forget how they had all rallied around, and continued to do so, after the Great Disaster, when they might just as easily have dropped his mother and Cam, Abby, and him as unworthy of their acquaintance.
And if he sat here any longer, he thought, getting resolutely to his feet, his bathwater would be cold or at least tepid, and he hated cool bathwater.
As he was climbing the stairs to his dressing room, he remembered that he had admitted this morning—to Lydia Tavernor of all people—what he had not confessed to another living soul in ten years. He had scarcely admitted it even to himself. He had resented and even hated Alexander when Alex became the Earl of Riverdale after he himself had been stripped of the title. He had resented and even hated Anna, who had stepped into the family as a full member, Harry’s father’s daughter and only legitimate child, at the very moment when Harry himself and his sisters had been bastardized. He had even hated Avery, his guardian at the time, for stopping him from enlisting as a private soldier and insisting upon purchasing a commission for him instead. He had seethed with hatred and impotent fury for a long time after he went to the Peninsula with his regiment even while he wrote cheerful letters home, claiming it was all a great lark and he was having the devil of a good time. He had poured out the whole shameful litany of his resentments to a woman he scarcely knew. One with whom he was contemplating having an affair.
What the devil must she think of him?
“You had better not come too close to me, Mark,” he told his valet when he stepped into the dressing room. “I smell of barnyard and stale human sweat. I stink, in other words. You would be well advised to stand well back and hold your nose while I strip.”
Mark Mitchell grinned and stepped forward to help him off with his coat. “One of these days when you tell me that,” he said, “I will take you at your word. And then see how easily you can sack me for merely doing what I was told.”
“Insubordination,” Harry muttered.
Lydia also had a letter. After going outside to admire her woodpile and being a bit jolted by the sight of Jeremy Piper peeping over her back fence, she went to call upon Denise Franks to pick up her cake plate, and stayed to share a pot of tea. She called at the village shop on her way home to purchase a few items and was handed her letter. It was from William, her middle brother, she could see. Sh
e always loved having letters from home.
Back at her cottage, she waited a little impatiently in the doorway while Snowball dashed over to the trees, did what she needed to do there, and came meandering back, stopping to sniff the ground in a few places and then eyeing a bird that was pecking at a worm down by the fence before deciding that it was not worth laying chase to. She trotted back inside, drank noisily from her water bowl, and plopped herself down before the fireplace.
Oh lovely, Lydia thought as she broke the seal of her brother’s letter, for there was another enclosed within it. Her name was written on it in the small, neat handwriting she recognized as Esther, her sister-in-law’s. She read William’s letter first.
Their father had taken a chill a couple of weeks ago after being out in a heavy rain while he was far from home. After a few days spent unwillingly in bed, however, he was recovering fast, though his temper had some catching up to do.
Lydia smiled. Her father had always despised any weakness in himself. He fretted whenever he was forced to be inactive. How on earth had James and William managed to keep him in bed for a few days? Had they tied him down?
Anthony, the youngest of the family, was almost finished with his studies at Oxford. He had abandoned his plans for an academic career, William reported, in favor of one with the diplomatic service. He had decided that he wanted to travel the world, preferably the hot, sunny parts of it. He was sick of the dismal weather that seemed always to settle over Britain to stay, summer and winter. He was convinced that it must be the most dismal country in the world.
I will give him a few years at the longest, William had written, before he discovers himself only too happy to return to this dismal country. Can you seriously imagine anyone, Lydie, choosing to live anywhere else?
No, Lydia thought, amused, she could not. But she had never tried living anywhere else. Or been anywhere else, for that matter. Neither had William. And perhaps all people considered their own country the best on earth in which to live. But she felt a surge of envy for her youngest brother nevertheless. At least he was free to dream large dreams and even to make plans for making them come true—because he was a man. So could she, of course—dream large dreams, that was. She could dream of living alone and having the means with which to sustain herself, for example. She had dreamed it, and now she was doing it. And she could dream of having a lover. She had dreamed it, and now …