by Rose Lerner
She was in mourning. Crying was expected. Why should she feel this embarrassment, this vulnerability?
Aunt Packham bustled in, and Lydia put on a smile for her. “Oh, you poor thing,” her aunt said. “When the visitors are gone we’ll put a warm compress on your eyes, with an infusion of rose petals. It will be just the thing.”
Lydia felt panicked out of all proportion, as if the whole world were looking at her. She had to wipe the strain from her face.
Well, and she could. She had been a political hostess since she was seventeen. Taking a deep breath, she shut her eyes and tried to find something glad that didn’t have her father in it. Even the roar of the crowd when the Tories won both seats in the recent election was tainted. She had been overjoyed; so had her father, and he’d had too much champagne and galloped home in the dark and now he was dead.
She thought of tea. Tea, and jam on toast. She breathed in deep, imagining she was smelling rich black pekoe tea. She imagined the crunch of the toast and tart sweet raspberry jam. The door opened and Luke carried in the tea tray. The smell wafted from the pot, adding to Lydia’s calm. She smiled at the footman and thanked him, feeling almost herself.
“I don’t know how you do that, dear,” Aunt Packham said, comfortably admiring. “A born hostess. Your father always said you could smile when the world was ending.”
Lydia’s newfound serenity wobbled. She took the lid off the teapot and leaned over it, breathing in the bittersweet, luxurious scent.
The door opened. She replaced the lid without hurrying, so as not to look as if she had been caught doing something strange, and stood with a smile. She felt genuinely well on the surface. Underneath…she could ignore that. “I do love the smell of fresh-brewed tea. How do you do, Mr. Cahill?”
The corners of his eyes crinkled warmly. “Very well, thank you. Miss Reeve, Mrs. Packham, may I present my brother, Mr. Ralph Cahill?”
She held out her hand. “A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Ralph.”
Mr. Ralph stepped forward, into the light. Lydia drew in a breath. He was—she couldn’t find a word. She was speechless. He’s good looking, she told herself firmly. That’s all. Plenty of men are good looking.
But Mr. Ralph was something out of the common way. He was well above six feet, his shoulders like something cast in bronze. His hair, tied in a short, old-fashioned queue, was molten gold in the candlelight. His features were chiseled, his movements graceful, and best of all, his smile lit up the room. Solid, bright, a hint of wickedness with nothing of disrespect. “It can’t be half as nice as meeting you, Miss Reeve,” he said. His voice was special too, a deep, confident, comforting rumble.
He wasn’t what she’d expected from unassuming Mr. Cahill’s brother. She fought a blush and sat as he bowed over Aunt Packham’s hand with equal grace. “Please, sit. Would you like some tea?”
They clustered round the fire, Mr. Ralph taking the seat by her while Mr. Cahill took a chair by her aunt. “Tea would be splendid,” Mr. Ralph rumbled, smiling again. His simple good humor was infectious. As she poured tea and listened to his earnest compliments on her biscuits, her earlier depression melted away like frost on a window when the fire was lit.
“How long have you been in town?” she asked.
“I came in on today’s stage. My brother said you were the thing best worth seeing in the neighborhood.”
“I promise to show him the church and the workhouse on another day.” Mr. Cahill looked up at his brother, obvious affection in every line of his plain face, and she felt a great pang of liking for him. A pang of envy too; his little brother, who wanted to settle down, had come to be with him at Christmastime.
Jamie wanted you to go with him, she reminded herself. “Mr. Cahill is very kind,” she said, and meant it. His deep brown eyes met hers and he smiled. Just a tiny quirk of the lips, but her face felt hotter than it had at first sight of Mr. Ralph’s cast-in-bronze glory.
She was lonely, that was the problem, lonely and susceptible to being paid attention to.
“Have you any plans tomorrow morning?” Mr. Ralph asked. “I had hoped that if I borrowed a horse from the inn, you might accompany me on a ride about the countryside. I know it’s cold, but it looks to be beautiful country.”
Her heart swelled with pride. “It is, and I’d be happy to loan you a horse myself. It’s too cold to go far, but if you dress warmly, in a couple of hours we could see part of St. Leonard’s Forest. Well, a lot of it is heath now, but…” Her gaze went to the writing table. “I really should spend the morning working at my correspondence. I’m sadly behind.”
Mr. Cahill gave her a sympathetic smile. “Surely under the circumstances no one will blame you. Take care of yourself, this once. Enjoy yourself.”
She nodded without conviction, wishing she could be so carefree, and not the sort of person for whom an unanswered letter gnawed away at the back of her mind. Nobody liked a stick-in-the-mud…but they liked all the things sticks-in-the-mud did for them, didn’t they? They liked not having to worry because someone else, someone who couldn’t sleep when she had left a duty unperformed, would make sure that nothing too terrible happened.
I’ll do it tonight, she promised herself. I’ll do it tonight and cry and put warm compresses on my eyes, and tomorrow morning I’ll feel better and go on the ride and be jolly company, and no one will have to know but Wrenn.
Mr. Ralph frowned. “Are you expecting bad news, Miss Reeve?”
She tried to laugh. “No, it’s only the condolence letters for my father. I don’t—I ought to want to read them. People have taken the trouble to be kind, but I—”
Mr. Ralph’s eyes widened. “Oh, of course! I ought to have begun by telling you how sorry I am for your loss.” He looked awkward, and angry with himself.
“Thank you.” She held her hands very still in her lap, trying to sound gracious and at ease.
He put his hand over hers for a moment, meeting her eyes. Aunt Packham frowned, but his hand was warm, and the gesture didn’t feel forward. It felt sincere and natural, comforting her as his words did not.
“They’ve written because they want to make you feel better,” Mr. Cahill said. “If reading the letters won’t make you feel better, there’s no purpose to it.”
Lydia knew he was right. She also knew people would feel slighted if she didn’t answer their letters.
“I could read them for you,” Mr. Ralph offered.
She blinked.
“I could, and help you answer them.”
Aunt Packham made a disapproving sound. So did Mr. Cahill.
“It’s too much to ask,” Lydia said, breathless.
He gave her that wide, infectious smile. “You didn’t ask.”
Aunt Packham made another disapproving sound, somewhat louder. To be sure, it wasn’t proper to let a gentleman read one’s private letters. But half of her correspondents kept secretaries, anyway. She supposed she ought to ask Aunt Packham to read the letters for her, if she wanted them read. But Aunt Packham would cry and insist on reading all the bits about what a wonderful man Father was, and no.
“It would be very kind of you,” she said. “But surely you and your brother would rather be enjoying yourselves…?”
Mr. Ralph shook his head, and Mr. Cahill looked between them in satisfaction as if—
As if he were matchmaking. She hoped it was only her own conceit; the idea made her more uncomfortable than it should have. “Then I would be very grateful. Really, I can’t thank you enough.”
“All I ask in return are several dozen more of these macaroons,” Mr. Ralph said. They all laughed, and Lydia tried to forget that look on Mr. Cahill’s face.
That evening, after they had gone—had Mr. Ralph bowed over her hand a little longer than he ought, and how did he make a country-squire queue seem so dashing?—Lydia sat at her desk, sorting out the letters that reall
y might be private from those she could show him. There were only a few, mostly from women near her own age who, as well as political correspondents, had become friends and confidantes.
She broke the seals and skimmed them to see if there were any urgent requests or news. At least, she began by skimming them. Grief was strangely like a toothache—one couldn’t help poking at it.
She didn’t want to feel better, not really. She was afraid of it. This grief was the last connection she had to her father, and when it was gone…he would be too, completely.
It was nice, anyhow, to read the letters. Painful, but nice. Her father was gone, but people were still thinking of her. People still loved her. Mrs. Innes had sent a book of mourning poems that helped her when her older sister died. Jane Gillingham tried to cheer her with a series of cartoons depicting her failures at foxhunting during the Devonshire county election.
Lydia put the private letters in a drawer to be answered later, bathed her eyes in rosewater and went to bed. For the first time in a fortnight, she was rather looking forward to the morning.
Chapter Five
It did not take Lydia long to realize that Mr. Ralph would never make a great secretary. He obviously found the written word a struggle, and was self-conscious about it. He sat squinting and reading each sentence over in his mind before he would venture to read it out loud in his deep, confident voice.
To be fair, some of Lydia’s correspondents had abominable handwriting. But even Emily Rathbone, who had won a penmanship prize at school and was still proud of it over a decade later, gave him difficulties.
He also had very little grasp of what was political and what was not; she skimmed the first letter after he had excerpted it for her, just to be sure, and found that a newly vacant living in Lady Maugham’s brother’s gift had gone unmentioned because Mr. Ralph “thought that was gossip about her relations”.
Once she had written her urgent request that Alderman Wood’s nephew, recently ordained, be considered for the post, she asked Mr. Ralph to summarize thoroughly instead. It was not efficient, but she only teared up once, when Mr. Ralph said softly, “She says your father was very proud of you.”
The things people asked for at a distance—letters of recommendation, advice, information, putting in a kind word with one of her other correspondents—she could mostly supply. But requests were piling up from Lively St. Lemeston too, and those—for pensions and annuities and warm clothes for the children and apprenticeships and loans to get through the winter—she couldn’t. She hadn’t said so to anyone, though. She had said she would see what she could do.
Could she ask one of her friends for a loan? It was for the Ministerialist party, after all…but she shrank from it.
In the pauses while Mr. Ralph wrestled with the written word and she wrestled with her conscience, Lydia watched Mr. Cahill talk to Aunt Packham across the room. Aunt Packham did most of the talking, actually, her soft, plaintive tone carrying clearly if her words did not. Mr. Cahill listened with every appearance of interest and enjoyment.
It was rarer than she liked to think that one of her visitors paid so much attention to her aunt. It was to his credit, whether he was only being kind or whether, unlike most men, he was willing to see the value in a poor middle-aged woman’s conversation.
Or perhaps—she remembered that matchmaking gleam in his eye. Was he keeping the chaperone occupied for his brother’s sake?
Don’t puff yourself up, she scolded, and tried not to like him more on that account, that he would efface himself in favor of his handsome brother without a trace of resentment. She wondered what he would think if he knew she would rather he had read her letters for her. Of course, he hadn’t offered.
He laughed at something her aunt said, a gold back tooth catching the light.
Lydia wrenched her gaze away. “I can’t thank you enough, sir, really,” she told Mr. Ralph.
“Evidently not.” He gave a warm rumble of a chuckle. Everything about him and his brother was warm, she thought. What a pleasant family they made!
She didn’t even know what the stab of longing that pierced her was for. She missed Jamie, of course, but Jamie had been at school most of his life; she had got used to missing Jamie. Besides, Jamie didn’t make her feel warm or safe. He was her little brother—her darling, nervous, funny, brilliant, stubborn little brother—and it was her job to take care of him, not the other way round.
You took care of your father too, said a stray disloyal thought, which she quashed.
It was a lovely feeling, though, to be taken care of, to be surrounded by friendliness and solicitude. She might wish Mr. Ralph had let her cut her own pen—she liked a narrower nib—but she drank the courtesy gratefully in nonetheless. She didn’t understand why the dozens of condolence calls she had received had made her long to be alone, and the Cahills had appeared from nowhere yet she already felt so comfortable with them.
“That’s the last of them,” said Mr. Ralph. “Would you still like to go for that ride?”
“Certainly. Do you—do you think your brother would like to come?” Her face heated at her fumble, and the note of self-consciousness in her voice. She was usually better than that at making an invitation sound casual.
He laughed. “No. Horses make him nervous.”
Lydia had, somehow, assumed this golden creature would sit on a horse centaur-like, as though he and the beast shared one thought, one breath. Instead, Mr. Ralph asked for a gentle mount and sat on it like the proverbial sack of potatoes. But unlike with reading, he laughed at this deficiency without embarrassment. The muscles in his thighs certainly showed to great effect.
St. Leonard’s Forest was too far to go with an indifferent rider, so she contented herself with a tour of the estate. Although her toes and fingers ached for hot water and a fire, and Mr. Ralph called cheerily, “I’m learning why Sussex mud is famous,” she had become so sluggish indoors that it was a relief to feel the wind on her face, however biting. But she kept to a canter—in courtesy to Mr. Ralph, and not at all because her father’s accident had given her a fear of even a mild gallop.
Trailed by a groom, they viewed the gardens, the greenhouse, the trout stream, the topiary, the antique statuary, and the shuttered Dower House.
“Does no one live here?” he asked.
“I wanted my father to let someone live in it—it would have been a splendid favor to do someone. We’re the Ministerialist patrons here, you know. But he was saving it for Jamie and me, when one of us married, or when Jamie’s wife became Wheatcroft’s mistress and I needed a home of my own.”
That might be a good many years, since Jamie was only twenty-one and had said over and over again that he didn’t want to marry despite her most forceful representations about the Wheatcroft legacy, the need for an heir for the estate, and the value of a screen in case anyone guessed that he preferred men.
She looked at the snug house studded with small windows—casements and dormers and a little round window like a Cyclops’s eye peering from above the arched doorway. The yellow stone walls and reddish clay tile roof made it look warm even in winter. Perhaps Jamie would be willing to let it. It was too bad for such a charming dwelling to stand empty, even if part of her had liked it every time her father said, That house is for my children and that’s more important than any favor.
“Do you think you’ll like living in it?” Mr. Ralph asked.
She’d miss being Wheatcroft’s hostess. She would miss her home. “I don’t know. But if I don’t, it won’t be the house’s fault.”
“You don’t mind that it’s so close to where you grew up?”
The question took her aback. “I love my home. I thought—your brother said you wanted to settle down yourself.”
Mr. Ralph frowned. “Did he now?”
Had she said something wrong? “Don’t you like Cornwall?”
After a moment
, his face cleared. “Cornwall is splendid,” he said, in that way he had as if he wanted nothing more than to share his happiness with her. “The sea there is only kissing cousins to the sea in Brighton. It’s wild and lovely and wants to tear you to pieces.”
She shivered and raised her eyebrows at him, half-teasing and half-appalled. “That doesn’t sound very lovely to me.”
He laughed. “I like a challenge.” He was very handsome when he said it. He was so tall, and his hair shone even in the gray, misty late-November light. He glowed with health and vitality; he looked as if he belonged somewhere that was trying to tear him to pieces.
She wondered if he had been so hale and hearty as a child. One couldn’t tell, of course. Sometimes sickly children grew up as strong as anyone. Jamie was rarely ill these days—but when he was, he still took everything much harder than his friends. When he’d been younger…she remembered his smallpox inoculation, and the mumps and the measles and scarlet fever (three times), the influenza and the whooping cough and pneumonia, a hundred nights she’d thought Death was going to reach out and gather him up in her arms. She shivered again. Had Mr. Cahill had an easier time of it? Or had he kept vigil too?
She wondered what Mr. Cahill and Aunt Packham were talking about—but that was rude. She was here with Mr. Ralph, and he had been very kind to her.
“Are you cold, Miss Reeve?” he asked her with swift concern.
“Only my hands.”
She realized too late that it had been the wrong thing to say when he reined in his horse and slid off. “Come here,” he said.
She dismounted, because it would have been rude to refuse, and because he was unlikely to really do what she was imagining. But no—he drew his gloves off and held out his hands for hers.
Well, she was cold. She took off her gloves, conscious of the groom’s eyes behind her, and let him take her hands and rub warmth into them. His hands were as good as heated bricks. She felt breathless, blushing when he met her eyes.
