by Mary Balogh
“Yes.” Vincent smiled. “Had you not heard? I would have thought everyone in Barton Coombs knew by now. An hour or two ago Miss Fry accepted my hand in marriage. I trust you will wish me happy.”
“Miss—the mouse?” Sir Clarence’s voice was almost a roar.
“Sophia?” Lady March said almost simultaneously.
“What?” Miss March said, sounding bewildered. “Mama?”
“We will be marrying in London as soon as I can make the arrangements,” Vincent told them, “and then I will be taking my new viscountess home to Middlebury Park. You must not worry about your niece, Lady March. She will be quite safe in my keeping. And cherished. Ah, I have just remembered something. Martin?”
He hoped the door behind him was still open. But he guessed that Martin had been keeping an eye on him while he was still in sight, to make sure he did not trip over any stone larger than a pebble or collide with a gatepost.
“Yes, my lord?”
“Martin,” Vincent instructed him, “fetch my purse, if you would be so good, and count out the cost of a stagecoach ticket. Sir Clarence will tell you the exact amount. You were kind enough to give your wife’s niece the fare when she left Barton Hall last night, sir, but it is not needed after all, and it is my pleasure to return it to you with my thanks.”
He continued to make his way along the driveway, hoping he was not going to mar his grand exit by tangling himself up with horses or slapping into an open carriage door.
“Mama?” Miss March said again from behind him, her voice tremulous.
“Oh, do be quiet, Henrietta,” her fond mama said crossly. “That hussy. After all I have done for her.”
Vincent felt the gatepost with his cane and passed safely through onto the street. He could remember games like this—one child with bandaged eyes being led a merry dance by another child and having to guess at the end of it all where he was. Vincent had always cheated, of course, as he supposed all the other children had done, by peeping below the blindfold. He wished he could do the same now. But the vicarage was not far away. He would find it.
He would always find his way, he thought, despite a dull feeling in his stomach that he had acted with haste on his first visit here today and would have to live with the consequences for the rest of his life.
Just before he reached the vicarage, he heard the carriage and four returning along the street in the direction of Barton Hall. It would seem that the afternoon drive and walk had been abandoned.
And so he had played one more prank upon Sir Clarence March, he thought. The last and by far the most satisfying.
And he had done something to avenge his lady.
“Do you go walking often? Do you have a favorite place to go?” Vincent asked Miss Fry as they left the vicarage a short while later. “I used to enjoy turning along the narrow lane beyond the smithy and then climbing over the stile and crossing the meadow to the bank of the river. As boys, we all used to fish and swim there. Usually swimming was forbidden, but we did it anyway, even at night.”
“I do walk,” she said. “Sometimes I go just into the woods in the park at Barton Hall, where I can be alone, and sometimes I go farther afield, wherever my footsteps lead me. I know the place you speak of.”
She had taken his offered arm, but she must have realized, as she did last night, that he could not lead her anywhere with any confidence. It was more likely to be the other way around despite the fact that he had his cane in his free hand.
He turned them in the direction they would need to take, and almost immediately they were hailed by Miss Waddell, who lived next to the vicarage. And she just happened to be in her front garden, she explained, trimming the dead heads off some of her flowers.
She must have seen him arrive, Vincent thought, for the second time today. And, like everyone else, she would know about the vicar’s finding Miss Fry in the church this morning and taking her to the vicarage. She would know too that Miss Fry had been tossed out of Barton Hall in the middle of last night. Had Mrs. Parsons not mentioned that she was planning to lead a delegation of protest to Barton Hall?
“It is a fine afternoon, Lord Darleigh,” she continued. “And Miss … Fry, is it not? You are Lady March’s relative, I believe, but are staying at the vicarage.”
Her voice bristled with curiosity, and Vincent realized in some surprise that the vicar’s wife had done as he asked and not told anyone of the engagement.
“You must hear the happy news from my own lips, then, Miss Waddell,” he said. “Miss Fry has made me a happy man today. We are betrothed.”
“Oh, my.” For a moment she seemed lost for words. “Then congratulations are in order. Well, bless my soul, this is unexpected news. Only this morning the vicar was asking everywhere about the possibility of genteel employment for … Well. Oh, my. Well, how delightful, I must say.”
It was not as difficult to get away from her as it had sometimes used to be. Vincent guessed that she was itching to spread the word before anyone else could.
“I do apologize,” he said when he was alone with Miss Fry again. “I made the announcement without first consulting you. I hope you did not mind?”
“No, my lord,” she said.
“I told Sir Clarence and Lady March and Miss March too, as I was leaving home a short while ago,” he said. “They had come to invite me to take a drive in the country with them and perhaps take a walk with Miss March somewhere along the way. It gave me enormous satisfaction to explain to them that I would be walking with my betrothed instead. I wish you could have been there to see their faces when I informed them just who that was. I am sure they must have been a sight to behold. Oh, and I had Martin Fisk, my valet, return the stagecoach fare to Sir Clarence.”
“Oh,” she said.
“We used to play merciless pranks on him when I was a boy,” he told her. “I say we, though almost invariably I was both the mastermind and the ringleader. Once we climbed onto the roof of Barton Hall the night before Sir Clarence was expecting a visit from a titled naval admiral and his wife—he had boasted of it for days beforehand. We flew a large sheet, painted with skull and crossbones, from the tallest chimney and hoped no one would notice it before the admiral’s arrival. No one did, and as good fortune would have it, there was a brisk breeze blowing that morning. If servants are to be believed, and they usually are, the first thing the admiral did after stepping down from his carriage was draw in a deep breath of fresh air and look up to where the sheet was flapping merrily in the wind.”
She laughed, a light, happy sound that delighted him.
“Were you ever caught?” she asked.
“Never,” he said. “Though there were a few close calls. Sir Clarence always knew who the culprits were, of course, but he could never prove his suspicions, and though some of us had stern parents, I have the feeling they investigated all complaints from the Hall less than vigorously.”
She laughed again.
“You had a happy childhood, then, my lord?” she asked.
“I did.”
He turned his head toward her and almost asked about her own childhood. But he knew it had been a difficult one and perhaps—no, probably—a very unhappy one, and he was trying to set her at her ease.
He guessed that they must be drawing close to the smithy, and, sure enough, he heard Mr. Fisk hailing him, and then he heard the approach of heavy footsteps before his right hand was caught up, cane and all, in a great big ham of a hand and pumped up and down.
“Vincent Hunt,” the blacksmith cried in his great booming voice. “I could not get near you last evening with my good wife. You are looking quite the grand gentleman. But still a rogue at heart, I have no doubt. Hello, missy. Don’t you live at Barton Hall? No, wait a minute. You are the one the vicar was asking about this morning. Wanted to know if my missus needed a helper in the house. Staying at the vicarage, are you? Well, I daresay you are better off there than where you were. I would not recommend the Hall to my worst enemy.”
; “Miss Fry and I are newly betrothed,” Vincent told him.
Mr. Fisk pumped his hand even more heartily.
“Ho,” he cried, “you work a fast courtship, lad. But you never were a laggard, were you? I could tell you a thing or two about this rascal, missy, that would make your hair stand on end. But he was always a good lad despite it all, and he will make you a good husband, I do not doubt. I am glad you chose a little country lass, Vincent—or my lord, I suppose I ought to call you now—and not one of them fashion dolls that the nobs usually marry. I wish you both happy. The missus would wish you happy too, but she is busy baking more bread and cakes for our Martin and is not looking out through the window. She thinks he needs fattening up like his dad.”
“I hope she understands, Mr. Fisk,” Vincent said, “that she has been fattening me up too. Her bread is the best I have tasted, and her cakes spell death to any good intentions of eating sparingly.”
He moved on with Miss Fry, and they turned almost immediately onto the quiet lane that ran parallel to the river but some distance from it.
“A little country lass,” he said. “Is that what you are? Were you offended?”
He knew her so little. Again he had that hollow feeling in his stomach of having done something impulsive and rash but irretrievable.
“Not when the alternative was to be ‘one of them fashion dolls the nobs marry,’” she said. “It sounds like a very undesirable thing to be if one wants to win the approval of blacksmiths, does it not?”
He laughed. Her answer surprised and delighted him. It showed both spirit and humor.
“Mr. Fisk is my valet’s father,” he explained to her. “Martin and I grew up together. When I was going away to war, he asked if he could come as my batman. After I was wounded, he insisted upon staying on as my valet, and I have not been able to get rid of him since. I have tried, especially in the early years, when I could not afford to pay him and all he got was room and board at the home in Cornwall where I convalesced. He flatly refused to go.”
“He must love you,” she said.
“I suppose he does,” he agreed. He had never thought of it that way before. He doubted Martin had either. “The stile must be quite close.”
“About twenty more steps,” she said.
He had not given much thought to how he would get over it. He had done much more rugged walking than this in the Lake District, of course, but there he had had Martin with him. Not that Martin ever hauled him bodily about, but they were accustomed to each other and comfortable together. Martin knew just what instructions and warnings to give and when to give them.
He could remember this stile. He had climbed over it a thousand times.
“I’ll go first,” he said when they came to it. “Then I can at least make some pretense of helping you over.”
He hooked his cane over the top bar. He was glad she did not try to take it from him or insist upon going ahead of him so that she could help him. A man must retain some dignity.
He felt self-conscious and actually rather terrified that he was about to make an idiot of himself. There were two wooden bars, one about three feet from the ground, the other about two feet above that—the one over which he had just hooked his cane. Beneath the lower bar there was a third, flatter one, passing underneath it but not at a ninety-degree angle. There was grassy verge this side. The other side was lower, more worn, and it had a dip in the center where thousands of feet had landed when descending from the stile. It was always full of mud—a boy’s paradise—after a rain. Fortunately, there had been no rain in the past few days. On either side of the stile there were high hawthorn hedges. Beyond was a grassy meadow, usually liberally dotted with daisies and buttercups and clover. And beyond that, at some distance, was the river.
He wondered if children still came here. He could not hear any now. But perhaps they were at school, that bane of the existence of boisterous youth.
He need not have worried. He got over the stile without incident, though he was glad he had remembered the dip on the far side so when he jumped down he did not go plunging farther than he expected. He turned back to the stile, found the post of the lowest board with the inside of his boot, and reached up a hand.
“Madam,” he said, “allow me to assist you. Do not be afraid.”
She laughed again, a pretty, trilling sound that seemed lighthearted, as if she was enjoying herself. And then he felt her small hand in his, and she jumped down beside him.
“Do we have the meadow all to ourselves?” he asked, though he was almost sure they did.
“We do,” she said, withdrawing her hand. “Oh, this is a beautiful time of year. The very best, with spring just turning to summer. The meadow is like a colored carpet underfoot. Would you like me to describe it to you?”
“In a little while,” he said. “Though you need not always feel obliged to do that. I am learning to experience the world through the other senses rather than straining always to imagine what I cannot physically see. When you describe a scene to me, I shall describe it right back to you, but my scene will be filled with sound and smell and sometimes touch. Even taste. Does that make sense to you?”
“Yes,” she said. “Oh, yes, it does. And it explains why you are not a victim.”
He raised his eyebrows.
“Why you do not act like a victim,” she explained. “I admire that.”
He tipped his head to one side.
“Have you felt like a victim sometimes?” he asked her. “We all do, you know. At least, I assume most of us do at some time or other in our lives. There is no shame in that, for sometimes we are victims. Sometimes, though, if we are fortunate or diligent, we can rise above self-pity. It has been made easier for me than it might otherwise have been, of course, for I inherited a fortune two years after I was blinded. That has given me a freedom for which I will always be grateful.”
“And I am marrying you,” she said breathlessly.
So that it would be easier to set herself free of being one of life’s victims? Though there was always more than good fortune involved in the shedding of self-pity. Sometimes, self-pity was so ingrained in people that nothing could persuade them to take joy out of living. Was Miss Fry self-pitying? He did not know her well enough to answer his own question.
“I cannot see you,” he said. “I have only heard you—and touched your hand and felt it within my arm. I have smelled the faint fragrance of your soap. I would know you a little better, Miss Fry.”
He could hear her draw a breath through her mouth.
“You want to … touch me?” she asked him.
“Yes.”
Not with any lascivious intent. He hoped she would understand that. He could not bring himself to say it aloud.
She was close to him, though she did not immediately touch him, and he did not reach for her. He could hear the rustle of fabric and guessed that she was removing her bonnet and perhaps her cloak too. He heard the slight scrape of his cane against the bars of the stile. She must have hung her garments beside it.
They were standing to one side of the stile. He hoped they were far enough over that they were in the shelter of the hawthorn hedge and invisible to anyone passing along the lane. Not that it was ever a well-used lane.
She had moved to stand in front of him. He could sense her there. And then he felt her fingertips featherlight against his chest. He raised his hands and found her shoulders. They were small and thin and yet sturdy. He slid his hands in until he felt the warm, smooth flesh of her throat. He could feel her pulse beating steadily beneath his left thumb. His hands moved up the sides of a slender neck, over small ears, and into her hair—thick and soft and curly and really very short, as she had said it was.
She looks like a boy…
He bent his own head closer. The soap fragrance he had noticed last evening was coming most noticeably from her hair. She must have washed it recently. He could feel the warmth of her breath against his jaw.
He explored her face with
his fingertips. A smooth, rather broad forehead. Arched eyebrows. Eyes that were closed—sometimes brown, sometimes hazel, she had said. With auburn hair. But he was no longer interested in color.
She had long eyelashes. A short, straight nose—but he could feel no resemblance to a button. Warm cheeks as smooth as rose petals, with well-defined cheekbones. A firm jaw, tapering to what felt like a pointy little chin.
“Heart-shaped,” he murmured.
With his hands cupping the underside of her jaw, he found her mouth with his thumbs. Wide. With soft, generous lips. He ran his thumbs lightly along them and kept them resting against the outer corners.
She had not moved or uttered a sound. Her facial muscles were relaxed. He hoped that the rest of her was too. He did not want to embarrass or frighten her. But his fingertips were his eyes.
He moved his head forward again until he felt her warmth and her breath against his face. She neither drew back nor voiced a protest. He touched his lips to hers.
It was not really a kiss. Merely a resting there. A feeling. A tasting. A recognition that they had agreed to a betrothal just a short while ago.
Her lips trembled against his for a moment and then relaxed again. She did not really kiss him either. But she rested against him. Accepted, perhaps, that they would belong together.
He drew back a little, raised his hands to her hair again, ran his fingers through it, and took a half step forward to draw her face against his cravat. He slid one hand down along her spine to draw her against him.
Small. Thin, or at least very slim. No really discernible curves, though he did not—would not—explore her body more intimately with his hands. He did not have the right. Not yet.
She yielded to his touch without pressing against him. Her hands held his coat on either side of his waist.
And they stood there like that, for how long he did not know.
She had described herself accurately. She was not voluptuously shaped. She might even, as Martin had said, look like a boy. She was surely not beautiful or even pretty. She almost certainly did not have the sort of figure that would draw male eyes. But, feeling her warmth and the softly yielding pressure of her body against his, and breathing in the soap scent of her, he did not care a single damn what she looked like.
