by Jane Ashford
“Shall I give my word not to repeat anything you tell me?”
She waved this aside. “It’s nothing so dreadful. Roger was dazzled by the exquisite daughter. No one could blame him. And through the efforts of her mother, he was brought up to scratch, as they say. As a canny mother is meant to do. I don’t know the details, but I’m fairly certain he didn’t intend to marry right then. But he offered, and Arabella accepted.” She sighed again. “I was delighted actually. She had birth and breeding and wealth enough to satisfy my husband. I wanted Roger to be happy. We went down to London for the wedding. And as soon as I met her, I knew. Have you ever felt your spirits sink to the depths all in an instant?”
Arthur nodded encouragement. He sensed that she had needed to say this for a long time.
“It was too late of course. And I don’t know what I could have done. Well, I do know. Nothing. Raymond’s health was failing, and he was beyond pleased to see his son safely married. He thought Arabella a paragon.” She made a wry face. “Most men did.”
“Beauty can be compelling.”
“Oh yes. And so my son contracted an unhappy marriage. I could see that he knew it when they returned here from their wedding journey. But those were Raymond’s last days, you know, and I was distracted.”
“Of course you were.”
She met his eyes. “You know what it’s like to lose the person you’ve lived with, cared for, over many years.”
“I do.”
They shared a moment of silent communion.
“The first time Fenella and Roger met after she came home from Scotland, I saw what a mistake had been made.” She looked distressed.
Arthur waited. When she didn’t go on, he said, “Yes?” It seemed they had reached the crux of the matter.
“Never mind.” She stood up, tilting her parasol to hide her face again. “It’s very warm, isn’t it? We should go inside.”
Arthur had to be satisfied with this, and he rather thought he was.
* * *
“You have no family at all?” John asked Tom. He’d inquired before, but he never tired of hearing about Tom’s fortunate situation. It seemed to John that there could be nothing more liberating than being an orphan with no connections at all.
“Shh,” murmured Tom. The boys lay on a stream bank in the cool shadows of a willow. Tom’s bared right arm hung down into the water, very still. “Here comes a trout. Now watch.”
John leaned very carefully, so as not to alert the fish edging up the shallows, sheltering under the bank and beside rocks. He saw it slide out of sight near Tom’s hand, just the moving tail still visible. Tom’s hand, with fingers turned up, moved by imperceptible inches to that tail. Then it disappeared as he began tickling with his forefinger, gradually running his hand up the fish’s belly. John was nearly lulled himself when Tom suddenly tensed, twisted, and pulled the trout out of the water and onto the grass beside them.
John flinched. He couldn’t help it. “How did you do that?”
“Learnt it from a poacher,” Tom said. “The fish go into a trance, like, when you tickle them.” He threw the flapping, gasping trout back into the stream. “It ain’t legal to take fish though, unless it’s your own stream. You shouldn’t be trying it.” He dried his arm on the grass and rolled down his shirtsleeve.
“I could never.” John’s admiration of his new acquaintance, already vast, swelled further. “Where did you meet a poacher?”
“Just rambling, on the way south from Bristol. Fella nearly took my head off with his club before he saw I weren’t the gamekeeper.”
John was fascinated by Tom’s life history. “That was before you met Lord Macklin.”
“Yep.” Tom turned onto his back and gazed up at the sky through the willow branches. “’Twas the very next day I came across young Geoffrey thinking he was hid in a hollow log and took him back home.”
“To Lord Macklin’s son’s house.”
“His nephew.”
“Right.” John was consumed with envy for Tom’s rootless life. It seemed to him an ideal existence, to have no last name with its weight of expectations, to wander wherever you liked. “Are you still thinking of moving on?” he asked. “Just walking off one day in whatever direction feels interesting?” He’d been transfixed by this idea ever since Tom had mentioned it.
“I expect I will,” replied Tom idly. His attention had been caught by a pair of dragonflies darting over the surface of the water. “Look at the way their wings go,” he said.
John gathered all his hope and courage. “Will you let me come with you?”
“Eh?” Tom turned his head to look at him.
“When you go. Run away. Or, it isn’t really. Running. When you walk off to see the world.” He clasped his hands, then quickly unclasped them. “I want to see all the snakes in the world. Particularly the spitting cobras!”
Tom sat up slowly, moving rather as he had when he captured the trout. He crossed his legs in the grass. “I’d just be rambling about in England,” he answered. “Mebbe Scotland. That’s right close, ain’t it? No cobras though.”
“But you can go wherever you want!”
Tom shook his head. “I can go where my feet will take me. And where I’m allowed in. That ain’t everywhere, by any means.”
“No one can stop you though.”
“Sure they can. I’ve been chased off and barely missed beatings. I was nearly taken up and put in the workhouse once.” Tom held up a hand before John could protest again. “Also. Seems to me it must cost a deal of money to get over to where these cobras live.”
John slumped, his dreams of unfettered freedom dissolving.
“You’d need one of them scientific expeditions,” Tom continued. “I heard Lord Macklin talking about one of them.”
“You mean like James Cook? I’ve read the chronicles of his voyages. And there’s James Strange and the other fellows in the East India Company.”
“Yeah. Them.”
“I’d love to organize a scientific expedition to catalog snakes in India.”
“Well, there’s people that do that, eh?”
“Like the Royal Society, you mean?”
“Sure.” Tom nodded wisely. “You could ask them.”
“They want men with university degrees and fellowships and such.”
“Huh. Are there fellows studying snakes in them universities?”
John sat very still. With a smile, Tom let him be.
Four
Macklin’s company was soothing, Roger thought as they returned from a morning ride the following day. He seemed to sense when one wished to talk and when not. And his conversation was always sensible. Should he ever need advice, Macklin was the man, Roger concluded. Not that he did. He had no pressing problems.
“Isn’t that Miss Fairclough?” his guest said, almost as if disputing Roger’s thought.
Roger looked. Fenella rode ahead of them toward the castle gate, alone, as was her habit. He was surprised. She hadn’t visited Chatton since their falling-out. His fault, he acknowledged for the first time.
Her skirts billowed in the wind off the sea, and her horse took offense, sidling and dancing. Roger worried momentarily, but she controlled her mount with casual ease, caught the cloth, and held it down.
“She’s the careless young lady you spoke of at the London dinner?” Macklin asked.
“Careless?”
“The one who urged your wife to venture out in bad weather.”
“Ah.” He’d spoken with extra rancor that night, Roger thought. His feelings had been rubbed raw by his encounter with his in-laws, and he’d been itching for a target. “I don’t think she did, really.”
“Indeed?” Macklin looked interested.
“Arabella had…strong opinions. I expect she did insist on going, as Fen—Miss Fairclough says.”
>
“I suppose Miss Fairclough might have refused to accompany her, to discourage her from going.”
“Wouldn’t have done any good,” said Roger. Opposing Arabella’s wishes was tantamount to a declaration of war, in her mind, and she fought the ensuing campaign without mercy. He’d learned that the day after his wedding.
“You think not?”
Roger pulled his thoughts back to the present. It didn’t do to remember those battles. If he thought of them, he might feel that brush of gratitude, that absolutely unacceptable tinge of relief at the fact of Arabella’s death. Suppressing all such inclinations, he spurred his horse to catch up with Fenella.
But she’d already gone in when they reached the castle. Her horse was being tended in the stables. Roger found himself hurrying. He discovered Fenella sitting with his mother in her parlor, laughing with her over some shared jest. The sight of them, leaning together in a shaft of sunlight, stopped him on the threshold.
They didn’t look alike. His mother’s willowy frame contrasted with Fenella’s compact curves. Her hair was silvered gold to the younger woman’s reddish tones. Their faces had different lines. And yet they exuded a kinship. The word delightful floated through Roger’s consciousness. Arabella had never sat with his mother, he remembered. She’d made certain that the dowager marchioness moved to the dower house, and their visits had been limited to formal occasions. An unpalatable mixture of emotion washed over him, along with a stab of pain in his midsection.
Macklin came in behind him, and Roger moved forward.
“There you are,” said his mother, rising. “How lovely. Come and sit.”
She proceeded to execute a maneuver rather like a dance, and before Roger finished wondering why she’d stood up at all, he found himself seated next to Fenella, while the two older members of the party were settled a little distance away. Perhaps his mother was taking advantage of the opportunity to flirt with Macklin, he thought. He was still a bit worried about her views on the earl’s visit. But when he looked, he found both of them gazing in his direction in an oddly unsettling way. Come to think of it, they didn’t flirt. They talked like old friends, and they were watching him now like kennel masters evaluating a promising puppy. Roger blinked. Where had that ridiculous idea come from?
Fenella held out a small packet wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. “I brought you this,” she said.
Roger stared at the gift. He had a sudden sense of the world gone topsy-turvy.
“It’s a tonic for dyspepsia,” she continued. “You put a few drops in a glass of water and drink it if you’re feeling ill.”
Under her clear blue gaze, he felt uncomfortably exposed. “Why would you give it to me?”
“You kept clutching your midsection at the rehearsal. And looking pained.”
“It could have been distaste for the antics they were putting us through.”
She smiled a little. “You’ve done it at church as well.”
Roger was embarrassed. He hadn’t wanted anyone to know of his weakness. It was then that he noticed she was holding the packet so that it was shielded from the others. “Where did you get this?”
“My grandmother is renowned for her skill in the stillroom. People come from all around for her remedies.”
“You sent to Scotland?”
“No, I made it.”
“Yourself?”
“Grandmother taught me.”
That and so much else, Roger thought.
“I was with her for years,” Fenella added. “I needed something to do.”
“Besides changing out of all recognition.”
Her smile deepened. There were the dimples he hadn’t seen in a while, Roger noted. They added an impish quality to her beauty. “Besides that,” she said.
Once again, Roger was ambushed by a memory. They’d gathered the leading families of the neighborhood at Chatton Castle to introduce Arabella to local society. His wife had reveled in the occasion, holding court like the queen. Her enjoyment had been a relief. Roger had hoped the admiration she was receiving might ease her growing dislike of her new home. More vocally expressed with each passing day.
Moving through the crowd, greeting friends and acquaintances, he’d come face-to-face with a lovely young lady, dressed in sea-green muslin, sporting those very dimples. Before they spoke, he’d felt a pulse run through him, like a thread drawing him closer, rousing more than interest. And then he’d realized that this was Fenella Fairclough, the girl he’d refused to marry. He’d turned away, rudely. And from that moment he’d set Fenella at a distance. He was newly married. Such attractions had no place in his life. Not for anyone, and certainly not for this woman, with their history. After a while, he’d managed to convince himself that the moment hadn’t happened. But he didn’t talk with her or dance with her or hang about any room she inhabited.
He’d tried to discourage Arabella from making friends with Fenella. Which had caused his discontented wife to do just the opposite, of course. Somehow, amazingly, no one had told Arabella their story. Probably because most everyone hereabouts liked Fenella, and hadn’t much cared for his late wife. He’d been foul to Fenella these past months, Roger thought. Yet she’d taken the trouble to prepare this medicine. “Thank you,” he said, taking the packet.
“You’re welcome. It’s no great thing.”
“It’s an unlooked-for kindness. When I’ve been unkind, at times.”
“You’ve had difficulties.”
Was that sympathy in her gaze? After all his rudeness? He could almost imagine that she understood the mixture of emotions plaguing him. The attraction that Roger had suppressed for so long came leaping out of its cage. Ever since he’d held her over his shoulder, he’d longed to touch her again, he realized. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“For?”
“The things I said to you, about you, after…Arabella’s death.” They’d never spoken of her.
“And about others,” she answered evenly. “The doctor, Arabella’s maid. You were rather free with your accusations.”
Roger leaned back. Had he expected immediate forgiveness? Apparently he had. Was he so complacent? His stomach gave a sharp twinge.
“They were quite affected by it, you know. The doctor felt like a failure. And Grace, the maid, was already overcome by grief for her mistress.”
Roger searched for words. Frustratingly, none came.
Fenella stood. “I must go. My father will be wondering where I am.”
Roger rose. He had to say something, but his mind was a jumble. She’d be shocked if she knew of his attraction, particularly after the way he’d treated her. This woman had run away to Scotland rather than marry him, he reminded himself. His urges were his problem. He turned away to ring for a footman.
Fenella said her goodbyes, fending off an escort to the front door, conscious of Lady Chatton’s interested gaze. Roger’s attempt at an apology had shaken her, she acknowledged as she strode through the hall, the long skirts of her riding habit looped over her arm. As had the way he’d looked at her. He’d been forbidden fruit since she returned home. Fenella stopped abruptly. “What?” she said aloud. Forbidden fruit? What sort of nonsense was that?
She walked on. The trouble was, since the pageant rehearsal, it was as if she could still feel Roger’s hands on her from time to time. His forearm around her knees, his palm against her back. The strength of his shoulder under her. That had been bad enough when he was carping at her. She could scorn his ridiculous attitude. If he meant to be pleasant now, she didn’t know what she would do. But this was no more than politeness, Fenella told herself. She wouldn’t refine too much on the change. She would remember that the present Marquess of Chatton had been revolted at the thought of marrying her. The word was not too strong. His expression on that long-ago day! Such disgust. She pushed the image out of her mind.
Outside, as she waited for her horse to be brought around, Fenella was surprised to see her nephew John appear from the direction of the stables, mounted on a horse from her father’s stables. Automatically, she noted it was a gentle one. She could trust their head groom to match guests and horses. And to send along the stable boy who trailed behind. “Hello, John,” she said as he approached. “Have you been visiting here?”
“I came to see Tom.”
Her sister’s son looked sulky, as usual. He really was a difficult boy. “The young man employed by Lord Macklin?”
“He isn’t employed. He’s his friend.” John’s expression dared her to argue with this assertion.
“Is he?” The connection seemed unusual. But it was none of her affair. “Are you headed home? We can ride together if you wait a moment.” A groom brought her horse and held it while she used the mounting block. Fenella arranged her skirts and took the reins.
“You don’t care about Tom?” said her nephew as they rode out the gates side by side. His tone was a little less gruff.
“What do you mean?”
“You don’t mind that I’ve been spending time with him?”
“Why should I?”
“He’s not gentry.”
John said this as if it was a phrase he’d often heard. Thinking of his father, a stiff, prickly man, Fenella understood. Fleetingly, she wondered if she had an obligation to consider Mr. Symmes’s prejudices. But Greta had sent her son north. She’d have to accept Fenella’s choices. “If Lord Macklin has befriended him, he must have a good character. And I’m sure you enjoy some company younger than me and your grandfather.” John had not taken to her father so far. The boy seemed afraid of him.
John looked surprised, but he said nothing. They rode on. Fenella’s thoughts drifted back to her conversation with Roger. He’d looked sincere when he said he was sorry. She’d felt some honest contrition. It was the first real connection she’d had with him in…well, years. She tried to recall another such moment.
“You’ve been kind to me,” blurted out her nephew.
