“He’s an artist,” Alistair said. “They go in for such theatrical gestures. They are masters at grand passions. I don’t call that love. If he had truly loved her, he would have found a way.”
THOUGH he’d turned the breakfast conversation to topics other than Mr. Carsington’s unhealthy appearance, and was much encouraged by his reaction to the Poynton matter, Captain Hughes was not at all sanguine about his guest’s health. Instead of steadily improving, he seemed to be growing steadily worse.
His confidence in Dr. Woodfrey shaken, the captain sought out Mrs. Entwhistle. While he enjoyed arguing with her and often contradicted her “insights” regarding human nature, Captain Hughes had nearly as high a regard for her intelligence as for her physical attributes.
A short time after breakfast, he met up with her in the park of Oldridge Hall. As he’d hoped, she was taking her usual brisk morning walk along the same woodland path she’d favored during her governess days.
In the old days she dressed simply in dull shades of grey and brown, as her position required. These days she was more colorful. This morning she wore a red pelisse. The matching bonnet was a fetching concoction of feathers and ruffles.
Captain Hughes paid her compliments, which she accepted with indifference, never slackening her pace. She grew more interested, however, when he told her how his guest reacted to the Poynton story. She agreed that Mr. Carsington’s affections seemed to be engaged.
The affair could not progress, however, if the man’s health was failing, and this Captain Hughes explained, was his primary concern at present.
“I can’t believe he looks so ill because he’s languishing for Miss Oldridge,” he said. “If you tell me this is the case, I’ll be ill myself.”
“Yesterday Mirabel received a letter from her aunt in London,” said Mrs. Entwhistle. “It included a detailed account, which she read to me, of Mr. Carsington’s love affairs. Given this report, I believe it is safe to say that languishing is not in his style. His style runs rather to dramatic scenes, impassioned speeches, and riots. These activities require a degree of physical effort incompatible with pining away or languishing.”
“Riots?” said the captain. “Over women?”
Mrs. Entwhistle’s frivolous bonnet bobbed up and down.
“Well, that’s more like it then,” the captain said. “A man of action, exactly as I supposed him.”
“Regrettably, your perceptions are not as acute as some people believe,” Mrs. Entwhistle said. “Mr. Oldridge is convinced that you alone understand what is wrong with Mr. Carsington.”
The captain looked at her incredulously. “I?”
Another bob of the bonnet. “Something to do with Egyptians, poppies, and…” She thought for a moment, biting her lip in a way that made Captain Hughes impatient.
“Egyptians?” he said. “Poppies? What the dev—How is a fellow to make heads or tails of that?”
“Mr. Oldridge wondered at Dr. Woodfrey’s not prescribing laudanum,” she said. “If I understand correctly, Mr. Oldridge does not believe a concussion is the trouble. He seems sure that you know what the ailment is. He has mentioned this more than once.”
“I only know Carsington don’t sleep and won’t admit it,” Captain Hughes said. “I thought he was worrying about his canal, or about Miss Oldridge blasting holes in his…”
He trailed off, because something was teasing in a far corner of his mind. It was like a dot of white sail on the horizon just far enough away to elude identification. He waited, but it never drew nearer.
“There’s no help for it,” he said at last. “I’ll have to talk to Mr. Oldridge myself. It’ll end in a headache, but it’s in a good cause, I reckon.”
MIRABEL, meanwhile, was also hearing about Mr. Carsington. While Captain Hughes was hunting down her father for enlightenment, she was receiving enlightenment from a group of ordinary women concerned about their and their husbands’ livelihoods.
Her mother had started the informal meetings many years earlier. The women gathered once a month to discuss worthy community projects and how best to carry them out. The meeting also provided an opportunity to air grievances before the one local member best circumstanced to address them: the lady of Oldridge Hall.
At one such meeting, eleven years ago, she’d gleaned the first clues about Caleb Finch.
The current topic was Mr. Carsington.
By now everyone knew why Lord Hargate’s third son had come to this part of Derbyshire. Not everyone was as thrilled as the gentry families with unmarried daughters.
The miller Jacob Ridler, like millers everywhere a canal had ever been proposed, was vehemently opposed, according to his wife. But he wasn’t the only one. Even those who’d seemingly benefit objected: the lime burners to the north, who needed coal for their kilns, for instance; purveyors of the various minerals, who had to transport heavy loads; and farmers looking to sell their produce and manure beyond the local market.
“The water is a great worry, miss,” Mary Ann Ingsole, a farmer’s wife, said while they prepared clothes for a needy family. “If the canal drains away Jacob Ridler’s water, he can’t run the mill. Then where do we grind our corn?”
“My Tom says they’ll send all our mutton, beef, and corn on barges down to London and leave us to live on potatoes,” another woman said grimly.
“Jacob says they have to build a reservoir,” said Mrs. Ridler. “But where, miss? Where’s a big enough parcel of land that don’t have a farm or quarry or livestock on it?”
“They don’t build reservoirs proper,” said another. “They burst, and somebody’s killed.”
These were merely a few of the objections. Mirabel listened to them all. When the women had finished unburdening themselves, she said, “I’ve made no secret of my opposition. But I’m only one woman, and it’s the men who’ll decide this.”
Mr. Carsington must hold a public meeting to form a canal committee and draft a petition to Parliament, she explained. This would offer the best opportunity for those opposed to speak up.
“But they won’t,” Mary Ann Ingsole said. “Even Hiram, who as you know never fears to speak his mind, don’t like to come out against Lord Hargate’s son.”
“Same with all of them,” said the woman beside her. “They grumble at home and amongst themselves, but they’d as soon be pilloried as say anything against him in public.”
“Jacob said he’d feel like a traitor. Everyone knows how Mr. Carsington got hurt. It was plain soldiers he risked his life for, like our own menfolk.”
“Besides which, Lord Hargate and the older sons have done so much good hereabouts.”
“If it was anyone else but him, the men’d loosen their tongues, to be sure, miss.”
Mirabel had realized the local gentry would prefer to avoid conflict with a member of Lord Hargate’s family, consoling themselves with their material gains from the canal. She had not imagined, though, that prosperous tradesmen and farmers would behave like medieval serfs.
If no one would speak up, she could not mount a successful opposition. Her counterpetition to Parliament would be dismissed out of hand.
She left the meeting and climbed into the gig, her spirits at low ebb.
Canal projects had been killed before, and she knew how it had been done. She had money enough to mount a battle that would tie up the parliamentary committee until Judgment Day with lawyers, witnesses, and petitions.
But she couldn’t do it alone. She was a woman, and couldn’t vote. Parliament would take no notice of her objections. They certainly wouldn’t believe she spoke for others if not one of these others would make the slightest murmur against the canal.
It was her own fault, she told herself, for not devising a better counterattack. If she’d devoted less attention to Mr. Carsington’s manly beauty and more to the canal, if she’d occupied her mind with business instead of finding pretexts to throw herself into his arms, she might have weakened his position by now.
Instead, he w
as advancing at a prodigious rate, without doing a single thing. From Sir Roger on down, everyone simply surrendered to the famous Waterloo hero.
And how could she blame them, when she, too, had surrendered—not her opposition to the canal, but everything else: her intellect and morals, her common sense and pride.
Not to mention she’d put herself in precisely the situation she’d been so determined to avoid.
Once again, as she’d done eleven years ago with Mr. Poynton, she was going to make herself completely wretched because of a man.
Why couldn’t she, just once, become smitten with a man whose plans and ambitions were not in irreconcilable conflict with hers?
She released a sigh and tried to let her surroundings quiet her mind.
It was early afternoon, and cold, though not bitterly so. Masses of grey clouds shifted restlessly overhead.
She drove along one of the deep, twisting country lanes Mr. Carsington so abhorred. In spring, the roadside would be thick with wildflowers, and the trees would form a graceful green archway over the road. At present, the lane was a study in drab greens and dull browns, lonely and melancholy to some eyes, perhaps.
It was not so to hers.
She could hear the wind make the evergreens seem to whisper among themselves, and she could watch it catch up handfuls of last autumn’s fallen leaves and scatter them, as a fairy queen’s attendants might strew flower petals along their lady’s path.
The steady clip-clop of her horse’s hooves, the sigh of the wind, the nearby chirp of an optimistic bird, the chatter of a squirrel—all these simple country sights and sounds about her gradually soothed her troubled heart.
As the unnatural gloom dissipated, Mirabel’s natural buoyancy returned. Few cases were truly hopeless, she told herself. They only appeared so to people lacking courage and imagination. She was not one of those people.
She should not feel stupid because she hadn’t yet discovered a way to defeat Mr. Carsington.
Aunt Clothilde was one of London’s most fashionable hostesses. Married to Lord Sherfield, an active politician, she dealt with politicians daily. Yet even she had admitted Mr. Carsington was a challenge.
For a man, Lady Sherfield had written, he was amazingly intelligent. He was chivalrous as well. Even his affairs—the “seven or eight” he’d referred to, which Aunt Clothilde had described in juicy detail—only testified to his noble qualities. He did not use and discard women, as rakes did. He was loyal to a fault, even with harlots and thieves. He was gallant and honorable….
Then Mirabel saw it, the glimmer of hope.
Hadn’t he said, time and again, that he wanted to understand the objections, so that he could address them? It had upset him when she’d told him that people were too overawed by his family and his fame to contradict him.
He had restrained himself with her, he said, because he wanted to behave honorably.
How would he feel, then, if she told him what the women had said today? How would he feel upon learning that simple, hardworking people were too mindful of his heroism and sacrifice and his family’s long list of good deeds, to express their true feelings?
If she could make him understand how very great and unfair his advantage was, perhaps he’d return to London and let someone else take his place here. Even with Lord Gordmor, the ordinary people would stand a better chance. Respect for his title would not stop them from speaking out on behalf of their families and their livelihoods.
Surely Mr. Carsington’s honor would oblige him to leave the field to a less godlike individual.
And when he was gone?
She mustn’t think about that.
Luckily, she had only a short way to go, and her resolve hadn’t time to melt away under the memory of boyish grins and pathetic puns and feverish kisses.
She still had her priorities in order a short while later, when she drove up to Captain Hughes’s door.
But before she could climb down from the gig, his butler came out and told her, with effusive apologies, that they weren’t receiving visitors. The master had gone out and left strict orders: Mr. Carsington was not to be disturbed under any circumstances.
“Nancarrow, this is absurd,” Mirabel said. “You know that Mr. Carsington was staying at Oldridge Hall recently. I’m sure Dr. Woodfrey never forbade my visiting.”
The butler’s face turned bright red. “I’m sorry, miss,” he said. “Orders is orders. I’m obliged particular not to make exceptions, as it sets a bad example, and bound to lead to mutiny.”
Nancarrow was the captain’s former boatswain, and fanatically devoted.
“Very well,” Mirabel said, though it wasn’t well at all. “Perhaps you would be so good as to provide me with pen, ink, and paper, that I might write Mr. Carsington a note.”
“No letters, miss,” said Nancarrow. “Too taxing for the gentleman’s brain.”
“It is only a few lines,” Mirabel began, then thought better of it. Unlike her own butler, Nancarrow was unaccustomed to thinking for himself, and could not, as Benton did, distinguish the proper circumstances for making exceptions to general rules. If she pressed the matter, she would only vex herself and make him miserable.
She drove away.
But not, as Nancarrow assumed, home.
ALISTAIR returned from his daily perambulation of the captain’s neatly manicured park about the time the gig made a detour, invisible to Nancarrow, onto a back lane.
Unaware of the recent dispute at the front of the house, Alistair was startled when a shower of pebbles struck his bedroom window, which was on the first floor at the back of the house.
Advancing to the window, he beheld Miss Oldridge standing in a flower bed below. His spirits instantly broke free of the gloomy mire into which they’d been steadily sinking since breakfast.
He opened the window. “Miss—”
“Shhhh!” She pointed to one side. Alistair looked. A tall, ancient-looking ladder stood against the building. While he watched in blank disbelief, she shifted the decrepit ladder until it rested next to his bedroom window.
“Miss Oldridge,” he began.
She gave him an admonishing look and put her finger to her lips. Then she began climbing up.
Alistair wondered if he was dreaming. Since this was far pleasanter than his usual dreams, he was content to enjoy it for as long as it lasted.
In very short order, the top of her ugly grey bonnet was level with the window ledge. An instant later, she was looking up at him, as though it were an everyday sort of thing for her to be perched on a rickety ladder a full story above ground level.
Dizzy, Alistair gazed into her twilight blue eyes and debated whether it was safe to sweep her off the ladder and into his arms.
“Mr. Carsington,” she said.
“Miss Oldridge.”
She beamed up at him. “I have come to beg a boon.”
The smile reduced his brain to jelly. “Anything,” he said.
“I thought you would wish to be apprised…” Her brow creased. She leant back, her smile fading.
Alistair grabbed the ladder. “Don’t do that! Are you insane?”
“You’re very ill,” she said. “No wonder Nancarrow was so obstinate. I should have realized.” She started to climb down.
“I am not ill,” he said.
She paused. “You look dreadful. I am sure you should not be standing at an open window.”
“Miss Oldridge, if you do not tell me what this is about, I shall climb down after you,” he said. “Without my overcoat or my hat.”
She came back up. “You’ll do nothing of the kind,” she said. “I only came about business. I had not considered how much it would tax your mind.”
“What business? You said you wanted a boon.”
“In a manner of speaking.” She stared at the rung she was holding. “But I did not think it through. I had not taken into account your great debt to Lord Gordmor. To have to choose between fair play and loyalty—” She shook her head.
“It is too much to burden you with when you are ill.”
“I am not ill,” he said.
She looked up at him. “Something is wrong.”
“Yes, something is wrong,” he said. “Something is terribly wrong. You. Me. This.” A sweep of his hand took in the space between them. “What is between us.”
She looked down toward the ground—a dreadfully long way down, it seemed to him. Her gloved hands curved more tightly about the rung she held onto. “I wish you had not said that,” she said.
“I didn’t mean to. But you—” He broke off, because she was ascending, quickly, and then she was shifting onto the ledge.
“Good God!” Heart pounding, he grabbed her and hauled her inside.
He wanted to shake her, but she broke free and stepped back out of reach.
“You could have been killed,” he growled.
“Only if you dropped me.” Her voice was shaky. “You shouldn’t have grabbed me. I knew what I was doing.”
“Did you?”
“I’m a countrywoman.” She straightened her bonnet. “Not like your London ladies.”
“No, not at all,” he said. “You are not like anybody. You are—you are—”
Her blue gaze lifted to his, and memories flooded him: every look, every touch…the whispery sound of her voice, the infinite variety of her smiles…the sweet yielding of her body. He, with his renowned tact and powers of address—he, who’d always used words so effortlessly, couldn’t string a thought together, let alone find words to express what he felt.
He made a helpless gesture and said stupidly, inadequately, “You are turning everything upside down and inside out.”
She flung herself at him, wrapping her arms about his waist and smashing her ugly bonnet against his chest simultaneously.
He caught his breath, closed his arms tightly about her, and crushed her to him.
“You shouldn’t have come,” he growled into the top of her bonnet. “But I’m so glad you did.”
“I should have stayed away, but I couldn’t,” she said, her voice muffled against his coat. “I jumped at the first excuse.”