Was he offering to buy the sheep because of Nita’s fears regarding Susannah, or was he speaking hypothetically?
“I want anything that makes a union between Susannah and Edward Nash less likely, Mr. St. Michael, but at the same time, I want you to have those sheep because you’ll care for them properly. You appreciate their value. Susannah is a grown woman, though. Who am I to override her choices?”
Mr. St. Michael winged his arm at Nita, abruptly the gentleman escorting a lady, but his expression had been fleetingly puzzled, as if his conscientious regard for livestock ought to have escaped Nita’s notice.
Shy and bashful both, and in the space of a few minutes’ conversation. Oh, yes, Nita was interested in this man. Dangerously interested.
Edward was on his best, gratingly gracious behavior, inquiring earnestly after Nita’s family, most especially after dear Susannah, and hoping that Mr. St. Michael could join in the rustic merriment at the assembly.
“Will Mrs. Nash attend?” Nita asked, and where was Elsie, the closest thing Edward had to a hostess? Nita had served the tea at Edward’s request, but the one cake she’d attempted had been stale.
“You may depend upon it,” Edward said with a smile Nita could barely endure. “Our diversions are few enough here in the country, so we must enjoy them when we may. Mr. St. Michael, a pleasure to make the acquaintance of a friend of the Haddonfields.”
Edward showed Nita and Mr. St. Michael to the door, cautioning them to take care against the cold, entreating them to give his regards to the earl and his countess, also to our dear Susannah—of course, of course!—and assuring them he looked forward to seeing them at the assembly.
The soul of earnest charm. Nita wanted to retch.
“Interesting exercise,” Mr. St. Michael said, whipping the tail of his scarf over his shoulder as they took the path toward the stables. “You’re right again. Nash is either suffering financially or he pinches what pennies he has. The carpets are dusty and bare, the house smells of tallow, and the andirons haven’t been blacked in a week. Where are your gloves, my dear?”
“Drat. I left them inside.” How quickly he’d noticed too.
“I’ll let the groom know we’re ready for the horses while you retrieve your gloves.”
Nita headed back to the house but took the path around to the kitchen door, rapped on the glass, then let herself in. Elsie kneaded bread at a sturdy wooden table, her red hair under a plain white cap, a long apron over her dress.
“Lady Nita, hello. I thought you were in the library with Edward,” Elsie said, giving the dough a smack.
The maid of all work shot Nita a glance and hurried off toward the pantries.
“Mr. St. Michael wanted to make Edward’s acquaintance,” Nita said. “Are you well, Elsie? I expected you to join us for tea.”
Elsie wasn’t taking off her apron. She appeared to find the potted violets struggling on the windowsill fascinating, and she wasn’t inviting Nita to have a seat.
“One can’t drop everything to take tea,” Elsie said, her humor forced. “Bread dough must rise when it’s ready and bake when it’s ready.”
Conversation faltered, along with Nita’s spirits. She advanced into the kitchen and came around the table.
“The maid could punch down that dough, Elsie Nash. What’s amiss?”
Beneath carefully applied cosmetics, Elsie’s right eye was bruised, the flesh about it slightly swollen.
“I fell down the stairs.”
“In the middle of a discussion with Edward,” Nita guessed. “What was it this time? You needed a dress for the assembly? No, you’d never bother asking for something so frivolous. The argument had to do with Digby.”
Something heavy shifted on the pantry shelves down the hallway.
“Digby needs heat in the schoolroom,” Elsie said tiredly. “He has a constant sniffle, and I fear he’ll develop lung fever.”
Digby was his mother’s world. Nothing less could tempt Elsie to take the risks she did. Nita gently tilted Elsie’s chin up, so what light the window afforded fell on her face.
“You used arnica and ice?”
“I did. It doesn’t hurt, my lady.”
“It hurt terribly, at first. Your vision hasn’t suffered?”
Elsie shook her head, but as far as Nita was concerned, Elsie was gradually losing her ability to see truth when it smacked her across the face.
“Elsie, one of these days Edward will do something you can’t hide, ignore, or have me treat. Then where will Digby be?”
“Digby will be grown and safely away from this place. Edward always apologizes for his little tempers, and he’s dealing with a lot. Digby and I are added expenses, and I should know better than to mention my petty complaints when Edward has been drinking.”
Nita hugged her, gently, carefully. Elsie was petite and could all too easily suffer serious injury during one of Edward’s little tempers.
“Avoid staircases, my friend,” Nita said when she wanted to have a little temper of her own, or a very great temper. “Send for me anytime. Bundle Digby up, and don’t fret too much about a sniffle. Keep him in clean handkerchiefs and hot soup.”
Elsie went back to studying the plants, which at this time of year bore not a single bloom.
“My thanks, Lady Nita.” Booted footsteps sounded above them. “You’d better go.”
Nita unwrapped her scarf—woven of merino wool—and passed it to Elsie. “For Digby.”
As footsteps sounded on the stairs, Nita scurried from the kitchen. She paused outside the door to withdraw her gloves from the pocket of her habit. Edward would complain about the stale cakes, but he’d been sober, so Elsie was not at risk of immediate further harm.
As for the scullery maid, she likely knew enough to remain out of sight when Edward came below stairs.
When Nita had quelled the rage roiling inside her and assembled a calm expression, she returned to the stables. She found Mr. St. Michael checking Atlas’s girth and looking impervious to the elements. Nita wanted to simply watch her escort for a moment, to let the sight of Tremaine St. Michael, self-possessed and honorable, shy and tenderhearted toward beasts and children, wash away the despair that besieged her.
“Shall we be off?” Mr. St. Michael asked. “I see you’ve found your gloves, and I could use a pint and a plate.”
Nita stepped into Mr. St. Michael’s cupped hands. “Hot food sounds tempting. Do you consider our visit successful?”
Nita considered this call an abject failure. Elsie did not yet condone Edward’s behaviors, but she already made excuses for them, and in another year, she’d believe she deserved his violence.
“The visit was all that was congenial,” Mr. St. Michael said, flipping a coin to the groom. A few moments passed in the relative silence, wind soughing forlornly through a stand of nearby pines as the horses walked down the Stonebridge drive.
“Nash might care for your sister,” Mr. St. Michael said as they turned into the lane, “though he cares for himself far more. But tell me, Lady Nita, how is it you sought your gloves not in the front hallway, where our host greeted us and took our wraps, but ’round back at the kitchen? I also notice that while you’ve found your gloves, you’ve lost your pretty scarf. Merino and angora would be my guess, a lovely article.”
He nudged William closer to Atlas. Nita was concocting some prevarication when Mr. St. Michael’s scarf settled around her neck, soft, warm, and bearing his heathery scent.
“You hate Edward Nash,” he said quietly. “I’d like to know why.”
* * *
Tremaine suspected that just as shepherds passed songs, remedies, flasks, and sheep lore around the campfire, schoolgirls traded insights about all manner of feminine wiles and artifices. One trick girls were apparently taught was that men were fascinated by women who fluttered.
Ladies fluttered their eyelashes, their painted fans, their graceful hands, their embroidered handkerchiefs, much like birds displayed their plumage when t
rying to attract a mate. Women fluttered their dower portions before the eligibles, and when they’d bagged their man, they displayed him like a prize before all the other mamas and young women.
Lady Nita must have skipped this chapter of the young ladies’ manual of marriageable deportment. Sitting atop her inelegant horse, she was still, calm, and all the more interesting because of it.
“Hatred is a strong emotion, Mr. St. Michael, also unchristian.”
“Hatred is a human emotion. I hated my parents for years, my mother in particular.”
Tremaine had dented Lady Nita’s monumental calm with that disclosure and disconcerted himself more than a little.
“I could never hate my family,” she said as the village came into view. Haddondale was a snug collection of shops and a tavern around a green, but it also boasted a handsome steeple on its house of worship. Lady Nita affixed her gaze to that distant spire.
“I might resent my siblings,” she went on. “I might be vexed with them, but never hate them. I suspect their sentiments toward me are similar.”
She provoked their admiration and bewilderment, not their vexation.
“They worry about you,” Tremaine said, “whereas my parents shuffled my brother and me off to my grandfather in Scotland, where we knew nobody, struggled with the languages, and were consigned to considerably reduced circumstances without any explanation.”
Lady Nita gave him the same look she’d worn when diagnosing his Oxfordshire sheep. Considering, interested, determined to get to the bottom of a puzzle.
“Tell me more, Mr. St. Michael. Scotland is reported to be beautiful, and surely your grandparents loved you?”
What had that to do with deciphering Gaelic or subsisting on endless servings of mutton? Tremaine had refused to eat mutton or lamb since leaving Scotland, and he now spoke Gaelic mostly to communicate with his shepherds.
“Grandmama died before I was born,” Tremaine said, “and, yes, in his way, Grandpapa loved us, but his way is stern. My father was titled and obscenely wealthy and very much a proponent of the status quo in France. This, of course, did not sit well with the people starving on his lands while he dressed in silks and grew stout on endless delicacies.”
Or so Grandpapa had explained, but what did a homesick boy care for politics?
“France has been troubled for some time,” Lady Nita said. “Your parents sent you to safety, from which one could conclude they cared for you.”
A memory rose, Tremaine’s last image of his mother as she scampered up the gangplank of the ship that would take her back to her husband and his wealth, her wide skirts dancing in the wind. She’d been fluttering her silk handkerchief in the direction of the sons she’d never see again.
Maybe that memory explained Tremaine’s intolerance for fluttering.
“My father cared for the title,” Tremaine said, turning his collar up against the cold, “and he cared for appearances. We were to visit Grandpapa for only a summer, but Grandpapa refused to send us boys back to France. He demanded that Mama also remain in Scotland, and the comte refused Grandpapa’s invitation on Mama’s behalf.”
“Did that invitation include your father?”
“Of course.” Grandpapa had been at pains to explain as much to the comte’s bereaved young sons. Tremaine’s ire had only increased, to think Papa also might have been saved by accepting a little familial hospitality. Tremaine’s rage at his mother’s desertion had taken years to fade.
“I take it your parents did not survive the Revolution?” her ladyship delicately inquired.
“They didn’t see most of the Revolution.” For which Tremaine had learned to be grateful. “They were victims of their own discontented peasantry and arrogance. They fell ill—typhus, cholera, I’m not sure which—the harvest was poor, and the physician did not dare treat them in the midst of ongoing riots.”
“Arrogance befalls many of us, but I gather you begrudge your parents their portion.”
No matter which way the lane turned, the wind seemed always to be coming straight at them. Now, Tremaine resented Lady Nita’s calm, wanted to push her off her horse and then gallop away, like the furious boy he’d been so many years ago.
“Scottish doctors are among the finest in the world,” Tremaine said. “They don’t distinguish between the intellectual and practical aspects of medicine, as the English still do. In Scotland, there’s no genteel separation between the physician, who literally doesn’t get his hands dirty, and the barber-surgeon, who deals in ignorance, blood, and death, often in that order. Had my mother remained with us, she might yet be alive. I have long wondered how my grandfather could allow his daughter, a woman whom he dearly loved, to return to a country in chaos, much less abandon her own sons.”
Grandpapa was alive and enjoying his wee dram morning and night. Also still quite stern, though Tremaine no longer found fault with sternness.
“Have you ever fallen down the stairs, Mr. St. Michael?” Lady Nita put the question mildly, but the bitter wind kissing Tremaine’s exposed nape also chilled something in her words.
“I have not. Why do you ask, my lady?”
“Perhaps you’ve seen others fall, inebriates, the naturally clumsy, small children. When we fall, our instinct is to put out our hands to break the fall, though that way, we often injure a wrist, a thumb, or forearm. Even if we can manage to break a fall, we’ll usually also suffer injury to a hip, the knees, even the shoulders when we land.”
Her ladyship was waltzing around some female point, though Tremaine had seen others lose their footing often enough to know she also recounted simple facts.
“Did Mrs. Nash suffer a fall?” he asked.
“Well, of course,” Lady Nita said, combing gloved fingers through Atlas’s dark mane. “They all say they’ve suffered a fall, but when we fall, we do not land on our eyes, do we? A blow that leaves bruises around the eyes is generally of a different nature.”
What was she going on about?
“If somebody delivers that sort of blow to me, my lady, I’ll return it with interest or call the fool out.” Though few took on a man of Tremaine’s dimensions when sober.
“Elsie Nash dare not return the blow, Mr. St. Michael, and your mother might have been legally unable to remain with you in Scotland. A married woman ceases to exist as a legal person, she has no more rights than your horse, no more rights than Susannah will have should she marry Edward. Think of your sheep, Mr. St. Michael, in the hands of a careless shepherd. That might well have been your mother’s fate.”
What had the law to do with a man’s moral obligation to keep the women of his household safe?
They’d reached the edge of the village. Tremaine suspected they were also nearing the limits of Lady Nita’s self-restraint, and if the topic didn’t shift, she’d turn her destrier about and go tilting back to Stonebridge.
“I had a violent temper as a boy,” Tremaine said, though he hadn’t exactly planned that admission. “After my parents died, I was in scrape after scrape, until I hit a cousin two years older than me. She was also bigger, taller, faster, and by far the more scientific pugilist. Grandpapa threw me to the sheep after that.”
Tremaine could still recall the startling, fascinating pain of being walloped stoutly on both ears in the same instant. He’d sunk to the dirt like a rock tossed into a well, and thanked God his cousin hadn’t gone after him with her booted feet.
Lady Nita combed out a braid she’d plaited into the horse’s mane. “Your grandfather threw you to the sheep? Not to the wolves?”
No wolves, but all manner of demons.
“When the shepherds drove the flock up to the higher pastures that spring, I was sent with them. They were a rough lot, but good people. Between the shepherds, the sheep, and the fresh air, I was at least able to attend my studies come autumn. I spent much of seven years in those summer pastures.”
Tremaine had had his first whiskey there, his first woman, his first adolescent heartbreak, all among the high
hills and lush pastures of the Scottish summer. Those memories defined him in a way he wasn’t comfortable sharing, even with Lady Nita.
This was her village, so Tremaine let her lead him around the right side of the barren green.
“Were you angry at the sheep?” she asked.
“I was angry at everything, at everyone, at God himself. I was the angriest boy who’d ever flung rocks at trees or broken off sapling after sapling out of sheer fury. I regret that destructiveness now.”
This time of year, the center of the village was an acre of dead grass with a bank of dirty snow along one side. Two huge oaks stretched bare branches to the pewter sky; a pair of enormous ravens hunched amid them.
“You regret a boy’s displays of grief?”
That terrible temper had been grief. Grandpapa had seen that as easily as Lady Nita had.
“Much of the Highlands used to be oak forest,” Tremaine said, “but that far north, trees grow only slowly. The forests were decimated to build ships for the Royal Navy—replacing them would take centuries, if anyone were of a mind to do so. I should not have killed trees in an effort to contaminate the very hillside with my orphaned rage.”
Her ladyship halted her horse before a tidy Tudor establishment, the Queen’s Harebell, according to the signboard luffing in the chilly breeze.
“We can grow more trees, Mr. St. Michael, but we cannot grow another Tremaine St. Michael or another Digby Nash. I’m sorry you lost your parents, sorry you had only the company of sheep and nature to ease your loss. Your mother loved you, or you would not have mourned her death so passionately.”
More female logic, and more truth. Tremaine had also mourned his father and, more recently, his brother. He was getting bloody sick of what few people he cared for going to their eternal rewards.
Abruptly, Tremaine wished he and Lady Nita were not perched atop their horses in the middle of the village street, where all and sundry might see them, because an urge plagued him to kiss the woman who understood small, violent boys and raged against small, violent men.
He swung out of the saddle and came around to assist the lady from her horse.
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