“Earnest is fascinated with your ingenuity under most circumstances.” She took a sip of her tea, wondering if she’d sounded like she were whining—and over a man she’d never wanted to more than kiss, for God’s sake.
“My favorite marchioness is out of sorts. Hale must have gone beyond soliciting business advice.”
“I provide him business advice in great detail, in my finest hand, on scented stationery. His next move is usually to demand that I take my place as a proper wife.”
“Doesn’t the man know you better than that?”
“No, Neville, he does not. I’ve borne him five children and been married to him for nearly thirty years, and he does not realize that I take a very dim view of men who comport themselves like domestic field marshals.” A few months shy of thirty years, but who was counting?
“I will endeavor to keep this in mind.” He popped the last section of orange into his mouth, holding her gaze while he chewed, the scamp. “Why did you marry such a blockhead?”
The question was fair, one she’d asked herself many, many times. “He was tall enough.”
Neville’s elegant, manicured hand stopped midreach toward his tea. “My dear, when prone or supine, a man’s height hardly matters.”
“I was seventeen years old, you dratted idiot. I wasn’t thinking about anybody being supine or prone, I was thinking about waltzing with him. Do you know how desperately a girl who is almost six feet tall longs for a partner worthy of her height?”
“I’ve wondered why you tolerate my company. Height would never have occurred to me as the sine qua non of my many charms.”
“Nor humility. Hale had height and a wonderful smile, and his papa was stupid enough to sign the marriage contracts my papa had drawn up. I was besotted with Hale’s beautiful manners and his beautiful speeches.” Also his beautiful body, but it would be disloyal to Hale to bruit that about. “We had some good years, and whatever else is true, my children are well provided for and welcome in every drawing room.”
Neville took a slow, silent sip of tea.
“Just say it, Neville. I consider you a friend.”
“What comes after the blustering? When dear Hale finally figures out that blustering and lecturing and cozening aren’t going to work, what then?”
“I don’t know.” She buttered another scone and took a bite lest some uncomfortable truth try to find its way onto the breakfast menu. Neville was a friend, but he was a man, too.
In less than two years, Deirdre would turn fifty years old, an age unthinkable to that girl waltzing around all those ballrooms years—decades—ago. As a wife and marchioness, she’d learned that nobody could make her as angry as Hale; nobody could bring out her stubborn streak as effectively.
And when he stopped lecturing and cozening and blustering, there was nobody whose letters she’d miss more.
She rang for her confidential secretary, bid the man copy the missive, then told him to fold it back up and return it to the sender with a fresh seal of the same colored wax as it bore when delivered—just as she’d done with every other epistle from her stubborn, pigheaded, high-handed husband.
***
“I was hoping Fiona might be free to join me for a short hack this morning.” Tye sent the child what he intended as an avuncular smile, and she grinned back at him and started fidgeting in her chair.
“May I go with Uncle, please?” She swung a pleading gaze from her aunt to her great-aunt while Tye busied himself with whatever he’d put on his plate.
Anything was preferable to meeting Hester Daniels’s eyes after that interlude in the garden last night. Sleep had eluded him for far longer than it should have, and for all the wrong reasons.
“My old bones tell me we’re to have rain later today,” Lady Ariadne said. “A ride this morning might be just the thing. Hester, you’ll accompany them?”
Half a question, half a command, both in the gentle tones of a matriarch whom Tye would have pitted against the late Duke of Wellington—with whom the lady had probably flirted in her younger years.
“You’ll want to change into old clothes, Fee.” Miss Daniels aimed a tolerant smile at her niece, a much-softer smile than Tye had seen on her even a day ago.
“If you’d like to join us, Miss Daniels, we’d be pleased to have your company.” Manners required him to say that. Manners did not require that he watch her mouth when she replied.
“I will let Dolly rest up today and maybe join you tomorrow. Fiona will be on her very best behavior if she has you all to herself.”
Even her voice was different, more musical, less clipped and strained. She looked like she’d slept well, too. For which he tried to resent her—unsuccessfully.
Fiona kicked rhythmically at the rungs of her chair. “Then may I please be excused? I have to change my clothes and ask Deal for some carrots and find my boots.”
“Look under your bed,” Tye suggested, helping himself to the bite of toast left on Fiona’s plate. “When I was a boy, my boots migrated there every time I didn’t want to make time to wash the mud off them.”
Lady Ariadne smiled while Miss Daniels hid behind her teacup.
“You’re excused,” Lady Ariadne said. “You might want to wipe off your boots lest you track mud onto your mama’s spotless carpets.”
The child was off like a shot, leaving a domestic quiet in her wake.
“It’s good of you to take her up,” Miss Daniels said. “She was used to having three uncles to tag after before her mother married, and everybody at Balfour treated her as a sort of mascot. This isn’t a MacGregor property, so her situation has changed some.”
“Rowan enjoys frequent exercise, and so do I. She’ll be no bother.”
This went beyond gentlemanly manners to an outright falsehood, and Miss Daniels let him know it by smiling at him directly.
“Eat your eggs, Spathfoy.” Lady Ariadne picked up a buttered toast point. “You’ll need your sustenance.”
Eggs. Tye glanced at his plate, where several bites of steaming omelet yet remained. He didn’t recall serving himself eggs, but then, neither could he recall three consecutive monarchs of the English royal succession when Miss Daniels smiled at him like that.
Fortunately, Fiona came pounding back into the breakfast parlor before Lady Ariadne could abandon Tye in Miss Daniels’s exclusive company. He let the child physically tug him from his seat and out to the stables.
“I want to hunt for the fox,” she was saying. “I hear him at night sometimes, and I think, what if he can’t find his family? What if he’s lonely or homesick?”
Or lust crazed.
“What if his mama signed him up for singing lessons?” Tye shot back. “What if he’s practicing his serenades for all the young lady foxes, or what if he’s had one pint too many at the local fox pub and he’s yodeling his way home?”
“Foxes don’t yodel.”
“In Switzerland, everybody yodels. They’re proud of their yodeling and their cheese. He might be a fox of Swiss ancestry.” Tye picked the girl up when they reached the stables and sat her on a pile of clean straw. “You are to sit there and not move until I lead Rowan out to the mounting block, do you understand?”
“Yes, Uncle Tye.”
And there she did sit, but ye gods, it seemed the less she moved physically, the more her mind hopped around and her mouth chattered on. What was his favorite bird? Did he know how to yodel? When was he in Switzerland? Her mama and papa might go to Switzerland, because it was near Italy.
By the time Tye had Fiona up on Rowan before him, he realized why the parents of young children wore a perpetually dazed expression. The adult mind was not meant to keep up with such gymnastics. He stopped trying just as Fiona’s chatter slowed to an intelligible rate.
“I like Rowan, even though he’s not very grown-up.”
“Why do you say
that?” The gelding was rising five and muscling up quite nicely.
“He’s working on his manners. Like there, when he scooted at the puddle? He wasn’t sure if he was supposed to say may-I-please or just walk right through it. You’re a good boy, Rowan.” She whacked him soundly on the neck, but the horse—perverse beast—didn’t take umbrage. If Tye had attempted to pet his horse thus, they’d be dancing all the way into Ballater.
“Shall we take a fence, Niece? Rowan particularly enjoys showing off his jumping style.”
“Oh, yes, let’s!”
She had the natural seat of the very young, and Tye himself enjoyed hopping the stone walls with her up before him. When Rowan had taken enough fences to have worked off some of his energy, Tye brought the horse back to the walk.
“Your father was not very keen on jumping, but he was a great whip.”
“My father?”
“Your first father.” He didn’t want to say her real father. Fiona had never met the fellow responsible for her conception—how real could such a man be to her?
“He didn’t like jumping on horseback?”
“He learned, eventually, but give him the reins of any vehicle, and he was quite at home. He abhorred the trains, said they’d put the horse out of business.”
“What else?”
He was learning to read her little body, to know an eager stillness from a tense one from a relaxed one. She was hungry—nigh starving—for knowledge of her father.
“He liked animals, like you do, and he hated asparagus.”
“I hate asparagus too. Even with butter and leeks, it’s still green and mushy.”
They came to a divergence in the path, and Tye took the left fork, away from Ballater. He’d considered making inquiries at the local livery regarding a pony—making them right before his niece’s dazzled eyes—but realized he had something even more fascinating than a pony to offer her.
“Shall I tell you a story about when your father was a young boy?”
“Oh, yes! Tell me every story you know, even if my papa came a cropper or got a birching. Children sometimes make mistakes, you know.”
“I would never have guessed.”
He gave Rowan a loose rein and cast back beyond the difficult years of adolescence to when he and Gordie had still been friends, confidantes, and conspirators. They’d run away together, tippled Papa’s brandy together—and gotten sick together as a result—and even tried smoking the old man’s cigars when they weren’t much older than Fiona.
He could see her getting into the spirits and trying to light cigars without even a sibling to limit her mischief. And while the house went up in flames, her aunts would scold her gently and blame themselves.
“Your father and I once came across a barn cat whose leg had got stuck in a trap,” he began. “We knew if your grandfather or the stable lads got wind of it, they’d shoot the thing. Gordie was young—probably about your age—and he thought we could take the animal to the local surgeon.”
The surgeon had humored them, and the damned cat had lived for years on three legs, too. Every time they’d come home from school, Gordie had gone looking for it, feeding it cheese and sneaking it up to their rooms.
“But what did you name the cat?” Fiona asked some minutes later. “He must have had a name?”
She asked for a detail, the kind of detail that would mean a great deal to a child. The kind of detail Tye had long since put from his adult mind.
“I didn’t want Gordie to name the cat. I told him when you name things, they mean more.”
“My papa named me.”
“Your father was sent to Canada before you were born. He could not possibly have named you.”
“Yes, he could.” Her certainty held an ominous note of impending upset. “He knew my mama was going to have me, and he said if I was a girl, I should have the name Fiona, because it was the prettiest name for a girl. He said if I was a boy, I should be named Lamartine, because it was the name of one of the finest men he knew. My mama told me this, and my papa said it.”
The horse had come to a halt while a strange sensation shivered over Tye’s skin. “I believe you, Fiona.” It seemed they had stories to tell each other. Tye nudged the horse forward.
“So what did my papa name the cat, Uncle Tye?”
He swallowed past the tightness in his throat. “He named her Fiona. Said it was the prettiest name he’d ever heard. She was his favorite, and came to him when he called her name.”
Never for Tye though. Not even when he brought the little beast cheese and tried for hours to coax her to his hand.
Five
“You two were gone most of the morning.” Hester watched while Fiona pitched off the big dark horse and into her uncle’s waiting arms. “I feared the rain might catch you.”
“Aunt Hester!” Fiona charged up and lashed her arms around Hester’s waist in the kind of spontaneous display of affection Hester still wasn’t accustomed to. “We jumped every stone wall between here and old Clooty MacIntyre’s, and Rowan was wonderful. We didn’t yodel, though Uncle Tye says there are foxes who yodel in Sweden.”
“Switzerland,” her uncle corrected, loosening the horse’s girth. He ran his stirrups up and brought the reins over the gelding’s neck. “And one might consider adopting a more decorous tone of voice, Fiona, lest you scare the hens off their boxes.”
Fiona let go of Hester’s waist and instead grabbed her hand. “The hens aren’t afraid of me. I pet them, and they let me take their eggs most mornings.”
Spathfoy passed Rowan’s reins off to a stable lad. “You’ve been petting Rowan, so why don’t you hie yourself to the house and wash your hands?”
If Hester had made the suggestion, Fiona would have argued that Rowan was a clean horse and wiping one’s hands on the grass would serve just fine and the house was too far away.
The girl pelted up the garden path, and Spathfoy watched her go.
“Fiona claims my horse enjoys hearing stories.”
Any animal with ears would enjoy hearing the man talk. “She can be about as subtle as a thunderstorm. My thanks for allowing us a morning of peace and quiet in her absence.”
His gaze shifted, taking a visual inventory of Hester. She wore an old high-waisted dress, a floppy straw hat, and gardening gloves.
“I was getting after some of the weeds. Mary Fran has high standards. Aunt Ariadne came out for a bit to supervise.”
“She came out to breathe the scent of heather, which I suspect is the secret to her happy old age. Might I hope luncheon will soon be served? Making up stories can leave a man hungry.”
He winged his arm at her as he spoke, and Hester took it.
“Now that our guest and the household princess have returned, luncheon will appear in not less than thirty minutes.”
They strolled past the very bench where Spathfoy had kissed her the night before. Kissed her and held her in his arms and heard all manner of difficult things from her.
“You should garden more often, Miss Daniels. It puts roses in your cheeks.”
She enjoyed the compliment. Didn’t look for innuendo in it, didn’t suspect it of having false motives. She let his words bring her a smile and then waft away on the gathering breeze.
“I like to dig in the dirt. I hadn’t realized this until my father died and I was practically immured in the Kentish countryside for months. Gardening let me escape my mother’s eye. Did you have to make up stories for Fiona?”
He gestured to a shady bench. “No, actually. Shall we sit?”
The ease of his invitation warmed Hester’s insides agreeably. The morning was still trying to be pretty, though overhead, the clouds were forming into increasingly massive gray banks between shafts of sunshine.
“I told Fiona of her father.”
She hadn’t expected him to say that. He took
a seat beside her, the feel of him on the bench comfortable and comforting. “I’m not sure she knows very much about him, my lord. Mary Fran and Gordie were not well acquainted when Fiona was conceived.”
“Gordie wrote to me about Lady Mary Frances. Said he’d encountered a young Scottish goddess.”
This was perhaps a confidence, but more likely a reminiscence. “And did your younger brother encounter goddesses often?”
“He encountered women frequently, not goddesses. Mary Frances hasn’t tarnished his memory for the child. I’m grateful for that.”
And that was neither reminiscence nor confidence, but rather a revelation, probably to him too. “She’s very fair-minded, Mary Fran is. Fiona has some of the same quality.”
“I told her as many flattering stories about her papa as the time allowed. I’d forgotten some of them myself.”
“Was it difficult to speak of your brother?”
They weren’t talking about her, they were talking about him, his family, and his role as an uncle. His willingness to do so was intriguing and suggested a trust in her Hester tried to ignore.
“Yes and no. My parents separated shortly after Gordie’s death. My father’s manner of coping was the proverbial stiff upper lip. His drinking certainly picked up, though.”
She wanted to take his hand. “And how did you cope?”
“Not by writing letters to my only niece about her papa’s brave boyhood exploits. It was some time before I even knew of Fiona’s existence.”
A dodge. Hester was surprised he hadn’t dodged any sooner in this unusual conversation. “What did you do?”
“I managed my sisters. I dealt with the estates, since his lordship seemed disinclined to do aught but ride his hunters over the property at breakneck paces. The solicitors turned to me as well, and there is no putting those fellows off for long when the press of business is upon them. I suspect the year of mourning is very different for men than it is for women.”
“Maybe not. I’m sure Fiona will treasure the stories you gave her. She’ll tell them to her children and to her grandchildren.”
Grace Burrowes - [MacGregor 02] Page 13
