by Anne Weale
“Thank you.” She was longing to ask him what vocation he had found, but she sensed that he wanted to tell the story in his own way.
Their glasses replenished, he sat down in the chair at the desk, turning it so that he faced her. Now, for the first time, he looked at her while he was talking instead of frowning abstractedly out of the window.
“I had bought Na Vell, and was living there in the spring and autumn, and working in various other places during the winter and summer, when Piers and Rowena were killed and I had to come back and become caretaker for Henry,” he went on. “As far as I’m concerned, my present way of life is a temporary one. As soon as Henry is capable of taking the reins, I propose to let him get on with it, and revert to my chosen way of life.”
He paused, still watching her intently. “I’m telling you this because I want to make it absolutely clear that all this” — with a gesture encompassing the huge room and spreading grounds outside it — “is not my life style. All I have of my own is Na Vell, and a small, earned income from one of the most insecure careers a man can choose.” He turned to place his glass on the desk. He had not finished the sherry, but he seemed suddenly to find the glass an encumbrance. With his hands on the arms of the chair, he said, “Now that you know how little I have to offer you, will you marry me, Imelda?”
In her daydreams never once had she envisaged this oddly formal proposal. She said in a quick, shaky voice, “Oh, Charles, you are a fool. Don’t you know that if people love people they don’t give a hoot about incomes and prospects and security?”
And then Charles was no longer in the chair, but holding her tight in his arms, so tight that she had to hold her
breath. “I wasn’t entirely sure that people did love people,” he said, close to her ear. “You’ve been such a sphinx lately, my love. I haven’t known what you’ve been feeling - except the night before last when you seemed afraid of me and ran away.”
This time she did not run away.
It seemed only a few moments later that the gong in the hall began to boom. “Oh, to hell with lunch,” said Charles huskily.
But a few minutes later he released her, and they looked at each other with the dazed, smiling faces of people still in shock from unexpected joy.
“Mrs. Betts, we’re engaged,” Charles announced, when the housekeeper entered the dining-room to remove their pate plates and serve the main course.
“Oh, Mr. Charles, I’m so glad - and so will your grandmother be. She’s been hoping for this for a long time,” Mrs. Betts said, beaming at them.
“Really?” Charles looked surprised. “She hasn’t said so to me.”
“Well, no, she hasn’t said so to me. But I know it will please her, all the same. She’s always been partial to Miss Calthorpe.”
“After lunch, we’ll send Grandmother a cable,” said Charles, when they were alone again.
It was not until they were eating cheese and biscuits that Imelda said, “You still haven’t told me what you did for a living, and will do again when you leave here.”
“When we leave here,” he corrected her. “That’s something else I ought to have told you beforehand, I suppose. I haven’t actually stopped doing my own work, but I haven’t time during the day, so I have to do it at night.”
“You mean when your grandmother thinks you’re struggling with the farm accounts you’re actually doing something else?”
“Yes, she doesn’t know about it. If she did, she would realise how uncongenial my daytime work is to me. And it’s for her sake almost as much as Henry’s that I’m here at all,” answered Charles. “My grandfather and I were always rather at loggerheads, and she did a lot to smooth my path as a boy. So I feel I owe her some serenity in her old age. In fact I shan’t be able to keep my secret much longer, because this was waiting for me when we arrived.” He took from his pocket an opened envelope, and handed it across the table to her.
The letter which Imelda unfolded was from the Secretary of the Royal Society of Literature, and it was an invitation for Charles to accept a Fellowship.
“You mean ... you’re a writer?”
“An historian,” said Charles. “One of your favourite historians, so you once told me.”
She looked blank for a moment. Then: “You can’t mean you are D. G. Hepburn?” Her mind flashed back to the day she had come from a jumble sale with a copy of Bayard, a favourite book which had been too expensive for her to buy when it was first published.
“My full name is Charles David Guy Hepburn Wingfield. Is it a sad disillusionment?”
“No - a fantastic surprise. To be marrying D. G. Hepburn ... I can’t believe it!”
“Being a writer’s wife is no picnic,” he warned her seriously. “You’re letting yourself in for some lonely evenings, I’m afraid.”
“I shall ask your grandmother to teach me all she knows about embroidery. I shan’t interfere with your work. I shall be too proud of it.” She gave the letter back. “Will you be installed with great pomp?”
“No, it’s quite an informal ceremony, I believe. One is introduced to the President, and one signs in with Byron’s pen. Reading a paper to the Society comes later on.”
“What are you writing now?”
“I’ve just finished a book about Richard Kane. He was a governor of Menorca during the British occupation who had a great deal of beneficial influence on the life of the island.”
After lunch, they lounged in deck chairs in the garden, drowsily talking and planning. Now and then Charles would lean over to kiss her.
“Enough of my career. What about yours?” he said. “I was wondering if you would be satisfied with a stall in the Wednesday antique market at my grandmother’s subscription library? Or is one day a week not enough? You would need another day to go about looking for stock, of course.”
“Two days a week would be more than enough, I should think, if I’m going to relieve your grandmother of the things she has to do at present.”
A frown contracted his dark brows. “It’s a lot for you to take on; this great house and three ready-made children.”
“The children are darlings. I’m very fond of them already. We could afford to have one more, couldn’t we?” His expression lightened into laughter. “I should think we might run to one more. Any ideas about where you’d like to go for a honeymoon?”
“I’ll leave it to you. You know more places than I do.”
“I should like to take you to the Jura Mountains, and perhaps further south to Dauphine.”
“That’s where Bayard was born, isn’t it? I suppose you went there for your book.”
“Yes, and I’ve always wanted to go back and explore
that part of France more leisurely. The Jura is heavily forested with slow, winding rivers and small hillside towns where there’s usually one comfortable auberge where the food and wine are first rate. The bedrooms are furnished with massive armoires and large double beds with feather duvets. Does that sort of place appeal to you, or would you rather go somewhere more lively?”
“The Jura sounds heavenly. But when? Were you thinking of next spring?”
“Next spring! Are you mad, girl? I was thinking of next month. Why should we delay until next spring? You don’t want one of those elaborate weddings which take half a year to organise, do you?”
“Oh, no, not a bit,” she said at once. “I’d much rather have a very quiet wedding like my mother’s to Ben. But won’t people expect you to have a traditional affair with a marquee and champagne and a photograph in Country Life? Somehow I had the impression that we should have to be married here in Norfolk rather than from my home.”
“Piers and Rowena had a fashionable wedding,” said Charles. “People will have to wait for the next one until young Henry finds himself a wife. I don’t see marriage as an occasion for lavish public display but rather as something which ought to be as private as possible.” A sudden flicker of amusement lit his eyes. “Do you remember the day I gave you a lift t
o Norwich to catch the London train?”
“Very clearly. I certainly never thought then that, before the year was out, we should be discussing our wedding. I disliked you more than any man I’d met,” Imelda confessed, with a grin. “Charles, why did you look so annoyed when I said I couldn’t see why you should be so concerned about my plans, except for the fact that you didn’t wish to fail Beatrix? You looked daggers at me, and said, ‘What do you mean by that remark?’ in your iciest voice.”
“What did you mean by that remark?”
“I thought you were ... involved with her.”
“Beatrix was attracted by the idea of being Mrs. Wingfield. Thinking we have a great deal more money than is actually the case, she was prepared to put up with the children, and with me as a husband.”
“I don’t think she found you unattractive,” Imelda said dryly.
He shrugged. “She wouldn’t have wasted much charm on me had Piers been alive and unmarried.”
“What was your brother’s wife like?”
“Rowena?” Charles considered for a moment before he answered, but there was nothing in his expression to cause her the smallest prick of unease. And when he said, “Rowena was a nice-looking lass, but not very bright and with very little sense of humour.”
Imelda knew the impression she had formed had been a false one, like so many of her ideas about him.
“Charles, why, when we were both travelling back from London, did you more or less cut me? Was it because you thought Sam had been kissing me when you came to the shop a few days earlier?”
“I must admit that I didn’t have very cordial feelings towards Sam at that time. But if I seemed to scowl at you at Liverpool Street, it was chiefly because I had just been caught by a particularly boring acquaintance when I had intended to spend the journey mulling over the notes I’d made at the Public Record Office. When the train reached Norwich I hoped to give you a lift home, but I couldn’t see you.”
“I was skulking in the ‘ladies’ to avoid you. How absurdly people behave when they’re in love! Can you imagine any sane person hiding from the man they most want to see in all the world?”
“Were you in love at that stage?”
“I think so. It’s difficult to be precise. Right from the beginning my feelings about you were very mixed. Even when I was furious with you for being so hostile and patronising the first night I stayed here, I remember thinking at breakfast that at least you were considerate with your household.”
“What did I do to earn your grudging approval on that score?” he asked, amused.
“You went to the kitchen to tell Mrs. Betts I had come down, and you took the coffee pot with you instead of ringing for her to come to the dining-room and fetch it. I thought it was an indication that you weren’t entirely selfish.” She told him about the remarks she had overheard coming downstairs, and which had set her against him. “When did you begin to like me?”
“I liked the look of you when I saw you walking down the platform with my grandmother.”
“You didn’t behave in a friendly way. You could hardly have been more standoffish.”
“Every time I was friendly, you froze. Why were you so uncooperative when I kissed you at Na Vell?”
“I thought you might be making love without actually loving. People do.”
He said, “I had already declared my feelings, but I don’t think you got the message.”
“What message?”
“Himmlisch lachelt mir die Au, denk ich als meine Frau.” The meadows seem like the fields of heaven when I think that you may be my wife ... that you will be my wife,” Charles amended.
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