It was too early to speak to her father. That, he knew for sure. Although he was already quite convinced that Miss Miller was the only woman in the world who could possibly make him happy, he understood well enough that to propose to a young woman of modest means, seemingly out of nowhere, was not the best way to ingratiate himself back in the good graces of the village.
And of course, he realized with a pang, he could not even go to his own father to speak to him about the prospect of marriage, for the old man was still refusing to see or speak to him. Though Adam felt that if his father was going to force an estrangement, there was certainly no need to seek his permission; the idea of making such a great decision without the input of his most trusted mentor pained him greatly.
So lost in thought was he that, for the second time, he automatically set off to Lawley Hall by the swiftest route, and forgot once again that it would carry him past the cottage of Mary Warwick’s mother.
This time, he almost bumped into the old woman where she stood cutting lavender from the bushes in front of her little abode. He leapt back in surprise, but Mrs. Warwick looked far less surprised to see him. He touched his hat with a hasty, ‘Good morning’, to which she nodded in acknowledgement.
“So, I see you are back, then,” she said. Her tone gave no indication of whether or not she considered this a good thing.
“I am, Mrs. Warwick,” he replied. Part of him wanted to launch into some manner of defense to assure her he had had no part in the death of her loved ones. But he knew that impulse had far more to do with his desire for his own peace of mind, rather than being an aim to aid hers.
“And your father still believes that you were the one who took away my Mary, does he?”
Adam, raised in the world of refined — that is to say, evasive — manners thought he had never been addressed so directly in all his life. Part of him was relieved that he did not have to circle around the matter, and instead he merely replied, “I am sorry to say that he does, ma’am. Although I cannot guess as to why.”
“I can,” the old woman said darkly. Adam waited, but her silence made it clear that whatever Mrs. Warwick’s thoughts were, she had no intention of sharing them with him.
Adam continued to stand there, wondering if he should simply offer a polite ‘good day’ and continue walking. The old lady kept at her task as if she had never been interrupted.
The words ‘Good day, Mrs. Warwick,’ were just about to emerge from Adam’s mouth, when the old woman spoke again.
“Have you been calling on Charity Miller, then?” she asked bluntly.
Adam was so surprised by her knowledge, seemingly drawn from nowhere, that at first, he answered, “Yes,” managing only barely to resist following the statement with a demand of “how do you know?”
But he restrained himself and instead replied. “I should not say that I called on her, exactly, but I met Miss Miller out walking, yes.”
“Her father will never let you marry her, you know,” the old woman said, with the same tone of matter-of-fact sharpness. It was as if she were an archer, casually taking aim and then shooting straight for the heart. Adam felt quite winded by the onslaught.
The strength of her words left no space for obfuscations or denials. Instead, he allowed his shoulders to fall as he sighed and nodded. “Yes, I do know that.”
“He guards his daughter jealously,” the old woman said. She returned to her lavender and began cutting the shoots with violence that belied the delicacy of her task. “He wants to keep her safe, you see.”
“Of course,” Adam said.
“I do not blame him.” At this, the old lady gave a particularly violent snip, and several lavender heads fell to the dusty ground of the lane. “I should have kept my Mary a good deal safer. It’s my fault, if it’s anyone’s.”
Her words filled Adam with a pain so great that it was truly physical — as great as any bodily wound he had ever felt.
“I do not know who is to blame for Mary’s death,” she said. “but I am quite certain that it is not you.”
He paused, and then added in a quiet and respectful voice, “I was very fond of Mary. I would have you know that.”
“Everyone was fond of Mary,” Mrs. Warwick replied. She ignored his gaze and spoke directly to the hedgerows. “Why should they not be fond of her? She was a lovely girl. If she’d been a lady like the likes of you, she could have made a husband of any man in the country.” She sighed. “But it’s different for our sort.”
Adam knew that there was nothing he could helpfully say, so he stayed silent.
“Mary was a lovely girl,” Mrs. Warwick continued. She stared straight ahead of her, and her shears became still. If it hadn’t been for the inflections of her speech, she might have appeared to be in a trance. “A lovely girl.”
She turned to look at Adam. For a second, her face was a mask of pure grief, but it switched abruptly back to its usual expression before Adam had the chance to express his condolences any further.
“You must live,” she said simply. “It is very important. To live, and live well. You never know what might happen. Mary died before her time, and her Freddie died before he ever had the chance to live, poor little mite.”
Adam nodded.
“Now, off with you,” the old woman said, as brusquely as if she were shooing a naughty child away from her kitchen door. “I’ve enough to be getting on with without dawdling in the lane.”
Perhaps Adam should have been taken aback by her impertinence, but even in the course of that brief conversation, he had found himself growing used to the odd manners of this old woman.
He bowed with a good deal of respect.
“Good day, Mrs. Warwick,” he said.
“And to you, my lord,” she replied. He did not bother to correct her, supposing that she still considered him a lord out of habit.
The next thing that she said surprised him greatly.
“I am glad that you are back.”
Adam paused for a moment, deeply surprised and a little overcome by the desire to tell her, once again, how sorry he was for her terrible loss.
But he was doing his best to learn to hold his tongue, and it was clear to him that there was nothing much he could say that might give comfort to Mrs. Warwick.
Instead, he bowed again, turned, and began to walk up the lane.
“Oh, and one more thing.”
Adam turned.
“Your father is not dying,” Mrs. Warwick said. “He is in a bad way, to be sure, but there’s life in him yet.”
Relief flooded through Adam. It was a relief that he knew to be entirely unjustified, given that the old woman had not so much as been near his father, much less examined him and come to conclusions as a physician might.
But the old woman seemed to have a way of knowing things that could not rightly be known. Perhaps Adam ought to have been afraid, but he was only glad to hear her words and absorb their meaning.
He set off down the lane toward Lawley Hall. His mind felt overflowing with all that had happened that morning, yet he felt lighter than he had in a long while. Something in the directness of Mrs. Warwick’s speech seemed to cut through all the angst of what could and could not be said, and to reach instead toward some more important truth.
Chapter 18
Charity spent all of the morning telling herself that Mr. Harding would not call.
She assembled a great number of reasons why he would stay away and tortured herself with each imagined excuse in turn. She told herself that he had merely been swept up at that moment, and that once he had returned home that night, he had thought better of it.
At other moments she stood in front of the looking glass and was sure that there was nothing that a gentleman, like Mr. Harding, could possibly see in a face such as hers. She told herself that he had meant it when he said that he wished to be her friend, and that she had made a foolish assumption in believing that he had meant anything more.
I assure you that my intenti
ons are honorable.
Again and again, she parsed these words, searching for any possibility of misinterpretation. She tried to think of a way in which their meaning had signified only a cordial wish to further their acquaintance as neighbors.
When she told Esther this, her friend had laughed heartily.
“It is a sad indictment of your faith in yourself that you harbor such doubts against Mr. Harding, my dear friend,” Esther had said. “Do you truly find it so difficult to believe that Mr. Harding’s feelings toward you may consist of a sincere and growing affection, which is exactly what you feel for him?”
And, of course, the truth was that Charity did find such a notion very difficult indeed to believe.
Of course, it was entirely appropriate that he had stopped short of declaring his affections, if affections were indeed what he wished to imply. Given that she had been so insulted by his forward behavior, she was pleased that he had learned from his mistakes and was proceeding at a more sedate pace. Calling upon her openly, under the watchful eye of her father, was precisely the thing to do.
But when he did the correct thing, when she heard his horse in the lane and looked out of an upper window to see that he was come, at last, she felt almost beside herself. She did not know what to do at all. How was she to behave with Mr. Harding in front of her father, when so much intimacy had already passed between them?
More to the point, how might Mr. Harding behave? Would he pretend not to know Charity at all, to be aloof and cold? Would he speak only to her father, to engage in lively exchanges with his old tutor and leave Charity excluded, in the way she always was from every substantial conversation?
All of these questions occurred to her at once as she hastily arranged her hair and hurried down to the parlor to receive Mr. Harding.
* * *
The Reverend Miller had not always been the way that he was now.
Charity could well remember a time when she was a little girl when his intellectualism and reserve had been combined with a real conviction and animation.
He was not the sort of man who had entered the clergy in order to live a reasonably comfortable and orderly life, and he was certainly not the type to take a cavalier attitude to his duties as a clergyman.
Indeed, his religious conviction as a young man had run very deep. He had been the third son of a country gentleman of some means, and could very likely have found some heiress to marry and lived as comfortably as a man of leisure.
But his vocation had pulled him very strongly, and when he had met Charity’s mother, he had judged her to be the finest partner in his calling that he could possibly ask for, or so he had always said. Charity knew in her heart that the reason that he wanted her to be the wife of a clergyman was that, to his mind, there was no higher office for a woman.
The change in Charity’s father could be traced back to when her mother died. After that, he had grown fretful, rigid in his opinions and demanding in his wishes, particularly those wishes directed toward his daughter. The father that Charity had once somewhat admired had been replaced by a tyrant. If he loved his daughter, then the love was primarily demonstrated through the control that he exacted over her.
Which was all to say that it was painfully evident that the Reverend Miller was not pleased to receive Mr. Harding in his parlor, much less to see the involuntary smile that sprang up on his daughter’s face when she greeted the young man.
“Well, Daughter,” he said at length, “I presume that you remember the Duke’s son, Mr. Harding.”
“Of course,” she said, averting her eyes from Mr. Harding’s face and doing her best to look solely at her father. “Indeed, we met at the ball only the other day.”
“How delightful.”
For a time they spoke of the usual things that one speaks of during a morning call. The weather, the entertainment that was taking place in the village that week. They did a splendid job of ignoring all the painful realities of the present situation and the fact of Mr. Harding’s long absence from the area, his estrangement from his father, his precarious situation.
But there must have been something that the vicar picked up upon.
Perhaps it was some shy smile that Adam and Charity shared.
“Mr. Harding,” the vicar said abruptly, standing up. “I am delighted that you have called.”
The tone of his voice betrayed the lie in his words beyond all doubt.
“Delighted,” the Reverend Miller continued, “and I would very much like to continue this discussion further. However, I am sorry to inform you that I am in haste to finish my week’s sermon. Therefore, I am afraid, we will have to cut this pleasure short.”
It was evident from Mr. Harding’s face that he understand the Reverend’s meaning exactly. He glanced at Charity — a brief look, but a burning one — and rose slowly to his feet.
“I should be very sorry to trouble you if you are otherwise engaged,” he said, his voice careful and correct. “I will take my leave of you now.”
The Reverend Miller nodded. His lips had formed a thin line of displeasure that he clearly saw no reason to conceal.
“I shall show you out myself,” he said. “Charity, would you run to the kitchen and see what arrangements have been made for this evening’s dinner?”
Charity stood up and nodded. She longed to look at Mr. Harding, to send him an expression that would convey all her regret at her father’s behavior, but she simply did not dare.
“Good day, Mr. Harding,” she said and left the room, not daring to give a backward look.
Chapter 19
Adam and the Reverend Miller had barely crossed the threshold of the vicarage before the latter’s face changed to one of pure, thunderous displeasure.
“I hope that I have not offended you, sir,” Adam said, “in calling upon you and your daughter. My intentions were only honorable.”
The Reverend grew red-faced.
“Honorable?” he spluttered. “You come here and demand that I vouch for you in front of your father, even though I am far from convinced of your innocence,” he sputtered, like a kettle that had been left for too long over the fire. “Now, you seem to be making advances upon my daughter. The audacity of it!”
He had reddened to such a degree at this point that his face was scarcely recognizable.
“I know your type, you young cad! You are deflated by the rejection of your father, and so you seek to amuse yourself by interfering with my girl! It is not to be born, sir, indeed it is not!”
Adam could scarcely recall the last time he had felt so surprised. The Reverend, who he had always considered to be a reasonably mild-mannered and judicious person, had morphed before his eyes into a creature of pure, volcanic rage.
He saw movement over the Reverend’s shoulder and realized that the face of Miss Miller was peering out of the window. She was quite white, and it was clear that she feared her father’s towering anger.
Adam cursed himself. By coming here he had angered Miss Miller’s father, and he knew that the former would bear the brunt of the latter’s anger after he had gone.
“I will leave you, sir, as I can see that my presence is not welcome,” he said quickly. “But before I go, I must say one thing, and that is that I came here of my own volition. Your daughter did not invite me here, and therefore I beg that you do not blame her for my coming.”
The Reverend’s eyes narrowed, the whites stark against the redness of his face.
“I suppose the young hussy has told you to say that,” he said, his voice growing gravelly with fury. “Well, mark my words, young man, she will not be making the same mistake again. Good day to you, sir!”
He nearly threw Adam’s hat at him and turned his back, before marching back through the doorway and slamming the front door behind him.
Adam stood there for a little while, stunned. He had set off to see Miss Miller with such a lightness in his heart, feeling that so long as she had forgiven him, then any other obstacle could be overcome.
But now it was evident that the matter was far from as simple as that.
He walked away from the vicarage, taking the stone steps through the garden two at a time, all his anger and distress at the vicar’s behavior converted into a powerful physical energy.
So lost was he in his thought that he nearly collided with Miss Campbell who was coming through the gate just as he was leaving.
“Good day, Mr. Harding,” she said, looking up at him with a sunny smile that seemed to clash sharply with his mood. Of course, there was no way that she could have known what had just taken place inside the vicarage.
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