by Mary Balogh
That had proved to be her undoing. If only when he had turned to leave she had kept her mouth shut. But no. After they had already said good night, it had occurred to her that this was her big opportunity, probably her only one. Ever. All she needed was the courage to seize the moment . . .
So she had opened her mouth and spoken. She, Lydia Tavernor, who never spoke without first weighing her words and being quite sure she had something of value to say. Are you ever lonely? she had asked—and had not had the sense to stop there, though even that would have been bad enough.
Her stomach had been a churning cauldron ever since. She had been unable to sleep properly, and when she did doze, she had bizarre dreams that were so much like reality that she jerked awake in a panic only to find that reality was worse. Her only faint hope—very faint—was that she had not said enough to make her meaning clear to him.
I value my freedom and independence too well. But they do come at a cost . . . I sometimes wish . . . With someone who feels as I do about marriage, that is, but nevertheless is sometimes lonely . . .
There was no way on this earth he could possibly have misunderstood.
What a colossal humiliation!
Two days after it happened, she had the opportunity to go into Eastleigh, a market town eight miles away, with the vicar and his wife, who often offered to take her when they were going themselves. Lydia suspected that the Reverend Bailey did not enjoy shopping and was quite happy for the chance to sit in the coffee room of a comfortable inn while his wife had the company of another female who enjoyed looking around the shops as much as she did. Lydia spent far more than she ought, with Mrs. Bailey’s full encouragement. She purchased a new ready-made dress, plain of design but of such a pretty pink fabric that she could not resist it. Isaiah had always liked her to wear sober colors, and since his death, of course, she had worn almost exclusively black and gray.
She spent most of the rest of her disposable money at her favorite place, which was fortunately Mrs. Bailey’s too—a needlework shop, where she bought a supply of bright yellow wool and a smaller amount of pink wool, several shades darker than her dress. It would make a very pretty shawl. It was an age since she had last knitted. She was going to start again. The vicar’s wife meanwhile left the shop with a fat bundle of embroidery silks.
Back at home, Lydia knitted whenever she could not invent something else to do—she could not concentrate upon reading. But knitting, alas, occupied only the hands, not the mind too. She tried knitting and reading at the same time, but the rather intricate pattern she was working made it impossible.
Perhaps by the next time she saw Major Westcott he would have forgotten. Perhaps he had not paid much attention even at the time. Yet he had stood on her garden path, frowning at her door—not that she had been able to see his expression in the darkness around one lifted corner of her curtain, it was true, but she would have bet the sixpence she had already lost at cards that he was frowning. He had stood there for what had seemed like an eternity.
Denise Franks, one of the friends she had made during the past year, distracted her one afternoon by calling and staying to share a pot of tea. They exchanged news and recipes, and Denise admired her knitting, which was already a few inches long, and chuckled over the bright yellow color. She had come to invite Lydia to a surprise birthday party she and her sister had decided to give for her father’s seventieth birthday. She was very grateful when Lydia offered to make a birthday cake, since she and her sister were swamped with all the other preparations.
“It was an impulsive decision,” she explained. “It was only when Papa told us a couple of days ago that we must on no account make a fuss over his birthday that we realized that yes, really we ought and must. He clearly expects it.”
“He will scold you and be delighted,” Lydia said, laughing.
She baked the cake the next day and decorated it with marzipan and icing the day after. By the time she was finished with the decorating, Snowball was restless. She had had only a brief outing before breakfast and was hovering at the door, whining. The front door.
Lydia hesitated. She had been avoiding the front entrance all week like the coward she was. Her front garden was directly across the street from the entrance to Hinsford Manor. In the past she had often been outside when Major Westcott came down the drive. She had never felt any awkwardness about smiling at him, raising a hand in greeting, even exchanging a few meaningless pleasantries about the weather with him. The sight of him had always brightened her day, in fact, though she doubted he had ever really noticed her.
It would no longer brighten her day to see him for the very reason that now he would almost certainly notice her.
Why oh why oh why had she done it? And why was it impossible to recall words once they were out of one’s mouth? If she could just hide away in a hole somewhere and stay there until he grew old and died or until she did, whichever came first, then . . . Well, then nothing. Sometimes one’s mind churned out the silliest of absurdities.
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 . . .