by Mary Balogh
“Is that what it is?” she asked.
Yet even that would be improper.
“If you choose,” he said. “It can be anything you wish it to be. It could be the beginning of a closer acquaintance than we have yet had. Even a friendship. Or it could be the beginning of something else. Whatever you wish.”
“Something else,” she said, and frowned down into her cup. “What does that mean, Major Westcott?” But she held up a hand, palm out, before he could answer and turned to look fully at him, still frowning. “That was an unfair question. And a stupid one too, for after all I am the one who started all this last week. Whatever all this is. Oh dear, I—”
She stopped and drew a sharp breath.
It was time for some plain speaking.
“You made it clear on that occasion,” he said, “that you do not wish for a second husband. Not yet, at least. You are happy here in this cottage in this village with your freedom and your independence, and I cannot blame you. Sometimes it must be hard to be a woman, or so I would imagine. But there are needs all of us share, men and women alike, cravings it is hard to deny and not so easy to satisfy—especially for an unmarried woman. Perhaps you believe you have detected a kindred spirit in me since I too live alone and am single. Perhaps finding yourself unexpectedly in company with me that night gave you the idea to broach the possibility of a mutual understanding, though you lost your courage before you could be fully specific. I do not believe I misunderstood your meaning, however, Lydia. You want a lover. Perhaps I do too. Perhaps that is why I asked to be invited in tonight and why you did invite me.”
“Did I?” she asked him. But she answered her own question before he could. “Yes, of course I did, but I did not want the responsibility of having done so. I left the gate open.”
Even in the flickering light of the fire and the candles he was aware that her cheeks had flamed red. But to her credit she had admitted the truth and she did not look away from him. Neither did she stop frowning.
“It seemed like such a splendid idea when I was simply dreaming it,” she said. “But when I was presented with the unexpected opportunity to actually say it, I realized how totally outrageous and unthinkable it was. I hoped I had stopped before you understood, but of course I had not. I am mortified. Oh, what a colossal understatement. I am sorry.”
“Sorry you made the suggestion?” he asked her. “Or sorry that I understood it and asked you to invite me in tonight?”
“I—Oh, I really do not know what to say,” she protested—and smiled so unexpectedly that Harry moved his head back an inch. Good God, she looked suddenly vivid and very pretty, that prim, lacy cap notwithstanding. “I keep waiting and hoping to wake up, actually. I am so dreadfully embarrassed.”
“You need not be,” he said. “I am flattered that you focused your dream upon me.”
She laughed and bit her lip again. That wide mouth, he thought, would be lovely to kiss. How the devil had she kept herself so virtually invisible all these years? That it had been at least partly deliberate he no longer doubted.
“I find that hard to believe,” she said.
“Why?” he asked. “Lydia, you must not underestimate yourself. If we are to have an affair, it will be between equals. Neither of us will be condescending to the other. Neither of us will be inferior or beholden to the other. Or superior either and merely conferring a favor.”
“An affair.” She did what he had done a few moments ago. She jerked her head back a fraction and then looked down at the hands spread across her lap, her eyebrows raised. Her vivid smile was long gone. “That sounds awfully . . . wicked.”
The dog had nodded off to sleep and was snoring slightly. It looked like a large white pompon on her slipper. Some chaperon.
“It is by no means inevitable,” he told her. If he were to press matters now and they ended up in bed together, they might be forever sorry. They would be, surely. They would find it impossible to face each other tomorrow and forever after. They were just not ready, if they ever would be. “I can drink my tea and go on my way, and we can forget the whole thing.”
She attempted to raise her cup from the saucer, but her hand was shaking. She set it back and put both cup and saucer on the table beside the tray.
Harry drew a slow breath. “We do not even know each other, do we?” he said. “Though we have been acquainted for several years. I suppose you know some basic facts about me. And I know that you were the wife of the Reverend Isaiah Tavernor and are now his widow. I have heard that you are the daughter of a gentleman of some substance. That is all I know, though. Perhaps before we make any decision neither of us seems quite ready to make we ought to learn more about each other and find out if we can be in any way comfortable together. If we can like each other at the very least. Tell me about yourself. Or is that too broad a request? Tell me who you were before your marriage.”
She sat back against one of the bright cushions and spread her hands in her lap again. They were bare except for the narrow gold band of her wedding ring. Her fingernails were short and neatly kept.
“I was Lydia Winterbourne,” she said. “My father is indeed a gentleman of property and fortune. He likes people to know that his grandfather was a viscount. I have three brothers, two older than I, one younger. The eldest was married two years ago. I have met my sister-in-law only once, at their wedding. Isaiah took me. My mother died when I was eight. She never fully recovered from giving birth to my youngest brother. My father has never remarried.”
“It must have been hard,” he said, “growing up as the only female in a house full of men. Or was it not hard at all? Were you the much adored treasure in their midst?”
She thought about it. “Both,” she said. “I was loved, even adored, to use your word, and sheltered from all harm. From the wicked world of men, that is. My father and James and William, my elder brothers, were all united in agreeing that it was very wicked indeed. I loved them dearly in return—I still do—and appreciated both their undoubted affection and their determination to keep me from all harm. Sometimes, though, especially as I grew older, I found it all more than a bit irksome and longed to break free.”
Hence the fact that she coveted her freedom now?
“You did not think of returning to your father’s home after your husband’s passing, then?” he asked her.
“Oh, they wanted me to go,” she told him. “All of them. My father and James came here for the funeral, as did Isaiah’s brother, and then accompanied me to his burial. Perhaps you remember?”
“I was away from home at the time, I regret to say,” he told her. “I was visiting my grandmother and her sister, my great-aunt, who lives with her. She—my great-aunt, that is—was ailing at the time and my grandmother was very much afraid she would not recover. I stayed until she rallied and began to get better.”
“They fussed and blustered and bullied, all three of them,” she said. “Though the word bullied is a bit unfair, for they had my best interests at heart, or what they thought were my best interests. I could not go back to my father’s house, though. I simply could not. And though my brother-in-law has always been kind, both he and his wife are nevertheless virtual strangers to me. It was good of them to offer me a home, but there was never any question of my accepting.”
“You do not like being looked after?” he asked her.
She gave the question some thought, and it seemed to Harry that perhaps this was characteristic of her, not to chatter on about anything and everything but first to consider what she wished to say. Though she had spoken without due consideration just over a week ago, had she not?
“I do,” she said. “Of course I do. Who does not like being cared for? But only if it is a reciprocal thing. Only if I can care for you as much as you care for me.” She darted him a pained glance. “I ought to have used the pronoun one instead of you and me. I was not speaking specifically—”<
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“I understood your meaning.” He reached out and covered one of her hands with his. His awareness of her became instantly more physical. It was a warm, soft, very feminine hand. “And I know how you feel. I can recall the time when I was brought home from the convalescent home in Paris—by my brother-in-law, my cousin, and my best friend, a fellow officer—still as weak as a newborn kitten and wholly unable to look after myself. My family descended upon me en masse and proceeded to fuss. You would not remember. It happened a short while before you came here with your husband. I appreciated their concern and also resented it—not, as I thought at the time, because I wanted to be left alone, but because they made me feel even more helpless than I already was. There was nothing I could do for them, you see.”
“You must have been very badly wounded at the Battle of Waterloo,” she said, “if you were still almost incapacitated two years later.”
“I was,” he said curtly. “There were times when I almost wished I had been killed outright, but those times were rare. Life is always precious. And my mother and sisters, my grandmothers too, would have been devastated by grief if they had lost me.”
“You were not intended for a military life, were you?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “I was brought up to be the Earl of Riverdale after my father. When I lost the title and all that went with it, I reacted with all the maturity of a bitterly disappointed twenty-year-old and got myself very drunk. I went and took the king’s shilling from a recruiting sergeant and prepared to go to war as a private soldier. I was furiously annoyed when my guardian, now my brother-in-law, found me, persuaded the sergeant to take the shilling back—not an easy thing to do—and purchased a commission for me instead. When I did go off to war, it was as an infantry officer.”
“Was it dreadful?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said. “And no.”
“You do not like to talk about it,” she said.
His hand was still on top of hers in her lap. She was as aware of it as he was, he knew. Her own hand was very still and a bit stiff. He curled his fingers around it into her palm. He continued to look into her face but did not answer what had not really been a question.
“How did you come to marry your husband?” he asked. “Was he a clergyman at your church?”
“He was a curate at the time, though not at our church,” she said. “But he was intended for far greater things. He had been groomed from birth for an ecclesiastical career and he gave himself to the life wholeheartedly. He was dedicated and ambitious. He was also full of genuine zeal and faith and energy. And terribly handsome. He was at university with my brother James. They remained friends afterward, and he came on a visit when I was twenty. I am not sure if he was brought there as a potential suitor for me. There had been a few others over the previous two or three years, all carefully selected. My father was a bit dubious about the lowliness of Isaiah’s position at the time, but of course he was the son of an earl and actually the brother and heir of the current one, and it was clear he was destined eventually for a position in the upper echelons of the church hierarchy. It did not matter to me anyway. I fell headlong in love with him. We were married two months after we met.”
“It must have been a terrible blow to you to lose him so young,” he said. A master understatement. How could it not have been? I fell headlong in love with him.
She half smiled and changed the subject. “The tea has grown cold,” she said.
She was as reluctant to talk about her marriage and its tragic ending as he was to talk about his military career, then. That was fair.
“Lydia.” He lifted her hand to his lips and kissed the backs of her fingers. “Shall we take things slowly? Or even— Would you rather end it now? It is quite all right if you would.”
“Is it what you wish?” she asked.
He ought to say yes and get out of here. But . . . He did not really want to. Not yet. He did not generally consider himself to be lonely—and quite possibly would not think so now if he had not recently spent a month and a half surrounded by family members who were anything but lonely, dash it all.
“I would suggest we get to know each other,” he said, “and make decisions about our future relationship as they become necessary. If they become necessary.”
Her cheeks flushed again as she gazed back at him. “I think,” she said, “it would always be wrong.”
“To be friends?” he asked her.
“No,” she said. “To be . . . lovers.”
“Shall we try friendship instead, then?” he asked. “There is no hurry to take it further than that, is there? Tell me, who chops your wood?”
She looked at him in blank mystification. “I do,” she said.
“Let me come tomorrow,” he said, “and chop a load for you.”
“But that would lay an obligation upon me,” she said.
Ah. Her need for independence.
“You may do something for me in return, then,” he said, turning his head to look at the bag beside her chair. “I assume you are a knitter. You may knit me a scarf. The only one I own is very nearly threadbare.”
Her eyes filled with sudden laughter. “When summer is coming?” she said.
“A British summer,” he reminded her. “Will you? Or is that an unequal favor? Will it lay too heavy a returning obligation upon me? I would provide the wool, of course.”
“Black?” she asked. “Gray? And I would supply the wool. I daresay you would not know what to choose that would not rub your neck raw.”
“How about scarlet?” he suggested. “Or yellow?” He tipped his head toward the bag. “What is that, by the way?”
She laughed. A delightful sound that did something to his stomach. “It is Timmy’s sunshine,” she said.
“Of course it is,” he said. “I am sorry I asked.”
She laughed again. “Timothy Hack,” she explained. “A little seven-year-old who has a weak chest and has been bedridden for almost two years now.”
“Daniel Hack’s child,” he said. “Dan is one of my gardeners.”
“I know,” she said. “I know too that you brought a physician all the way from Eastleigh a while ago when Dr. Powis admitted he was baffled. And you paid for the medicine that was prescribed. These things do not go unnoticed in the village.”
“What is Timmy’s sunshine?” he asked.
“I took him some sweet biscuits in the shapes of various animals a month or so ago,” she told him. “We had some fun while he tried to identify them. He did not have a great deal of success, which fact reflected more upon my artistic skills, alas, than it did upon him. He thought the horse was a fox. But he was dreadfully pale and listless most of the time I was there, and his room was dark with the curtains drawn across the window. And stuffy because the window was shut tight. Nothing in the room had any color. He told me that what he wants more than anything else when he gets better is the sunshine. I cannot take him that, alas, though I do hope that when the weather gets warmer he will be carried outside some days to feel the sun’s rays on his skin. What I can do, though, is knit him some substitute sunshine. It is a blanket, small enough not to weigh him down, large enough to cover his legs and even be pulled up to his chin if he wants extra warmth without exposing his feet to the cold. When it is finished I am going to embroider his name across the top band in red, green, blue, orange, and purple letters. It is going to be downright garish. And I am going to buy him a book I saw the day I purchased the wool in town. It is full of adventure stories for children, and it has pictures.”
“Dan cannot read,” he said. “I doubt Mrs. Hack can either.”
“But Timmy can,” she said. “Isaiah taught him when he was just five. And he gave him a Bible and a book of moral tales for children to practice on.”
Harry smiled at her. “I will find out from the physician if fresh air and sunshine—the real ou
tdoor sunshine—will be good for Timmy,” he said. “I cannot imagine they would not be, but who am I to claim to know for certain? If the doctor says yes, then I will have a word with Dan.”
“Thank you,” she said. “Come and chop my wood, then, if you must, but on one occasion only. You will not then have to make an exhibition of yourself by wearing a scarf of my making in July.”
“Oh, but I must have the scarf. I will not chop your wood otherwise,” he said, getting to his feet and grinning at her as she got to hers.
She laughed again, and he crossed the room and pulled on his greatcoat. He lit his lantern from the candle by the door, put on his hat and gloves, and turned to take his leave of her.
“Good night, Lydia,” he said. “Thank you for the tea. Oh, we did not drink it, did we? Well, thank you for the conversation. Anything but pink for the scarf. Though preferably not black or gray either. Too . . . staid.” He grinned at her again. “Why should Timmy have the sunshine while I have to make do with the rain clouds?”
“Good night, Harry,” she said. “You really must not feel obliged to come here to chop wood tomorrow, you know. I am quite capable of doing it for myself.”
“I do not doubt it,” he said, and leaned forward to kiss her cheek before opening the door to let himself out. Her cheek was warm and smooth and smelled of that soap or perfume he had noticed earlier. Her dog, which had been pitched off her slipper, was yapping at him, since clearly it was his fault that its sleep had been disturbed.
Perhaps, he thought as he made his way home, Lydia Tavernor really did not want him to go back there. It was what he should want too—or not want. Something had started between them last week and continued into this evening, however, and neither of them seemed to know if it was something they should encourage or . . . not.
The biggest surprise for him was that he found her attractive. Very attractive, actually.
He had promised to return tomorrow morning.