“They were,” Mr. Belmont said, “and now I miss their noise. Let’s turn in here, shall we? Would you like to canter up the drive, Miss Priscilla?”
“That would be lovely!”
“Grab some mane.” He took both sets of reins in one hand and wrapped an arm snugly about the child. “Ready, Miss Jennings?”
Theresa nodded, but was still taken by surprise when Hermes sprang forward and Evan followed suit, albeit at a more sedate pace. She was even more taken aback to see Mr. Belmont turn his big gray toward an old horse trough that had been planted with pansies and chrysanthemums. Heart in her throat, she watched as he guided the horse to a foot-perfect approach, take-off, and landing, Priscilla laughing uproariously as they came back down to the walk.
“Mr. Belmont! Can we do that again? Please may we?”
“If your mother has no objection, though based on the expression on your mama’s face, I should have asked permission first.”
He hadn’t asked permission in the garden last night either. Was he alluding to that presumption?
“Mama?”
“Of course you may,” Theresa replied, forcing a smile. The dratted man had likely seen her, gloved hand smacked over her own mouth so she wouldn’t scream and upset the horses. “But you must not pester, Priscilla. Twice will have to be enough for now.”
“Thank you!”
Mr. Belmont obligingly wheeled the horse into a rocking canter, and put him to the jump again.
“That was the best!” Priscilla announced, patting Hermes’s neck in solid thumps. “That was top of the trees. All the heroines in my stories will jump enormous banks of flowers.”
“Hermes is a talented and experienced jumper,” Mr. Belmont said, “but you must promise me that you will never, ever, attempt to take a horse over an obstacle without supervision. I’ve seen more horses than I care to count maimed and mortally injured when carelessly put to a fence.”
Mr. Belmont had been clever to add that last, about the horses being injured. Priscilla’s soft heart would never jeopardize a beast, though she’d defy her mother’s commands when tired or provoked.
“I promise, Mr. Belmont. May we see the ponies now?”
“We’ll let Evan and Hermes blow while we walk out to the pony paddock.” He swung down, then lifted Priscilla to the ground as a stable lad appeared to take the horses.
“Good day, Squire.” The man’s smile suggested friendly respect toward his employer. This fellow was only an inch or so taller than Jamie, though dark-complected and much younger. “I saw you and himself showing off for the ladies.”
“Good day, Spiker,” the squire replied, looking just a touch… smug. “You can hardly call hopping a bed of flowers showing off.” He passed over the grey’s reins, then walked over to Evan’s side.
Theresa didn’t grasp Mr. Belmont’s intentions until his hands were at her waist.
“Watch the whip,” he cautioned as she unhooked her knee from the horn. Surely Mr. Belmont was simply being his typical courteous self when he didn’t simply swing her down from the horse. He settled Theresa on the ground, his strength guiding her descent along his frame until her feet were under her and she had her balance.
For a moment, she stood where she’d landed, like some drunken bee in the vicinity of its preferred blossom. Her imagination suggested Mr. Belmont’s hands lingered at her waist, while her common sense declared her daft.
“My sons are doing famously with my brother in Oxfordshire,” Mr. Belmont said. “Two of them even managed to write their old papa this week, and I love to be out of doors in weather like this, particularly in such wonderful company.” He stepped back. “I have no favorite autumn flower, but I rather admire the pansy.”
He’d recalled Theresa’s questions.
“You admire pansies? Heartsease is considered nondescript by the serious gardener.” While blessed with vivid coloring, the little flower could not tolerate heat and had little fragrance.
“They are the furthest thing from nondescript.” Mr. Belmont let Priscilla take one of his hands, even as the child grabbed for her mother’s hand on the other side. “Pansies are not afraid to be bold, to put purple right next to yellow, or white in the middle of a soft blue. They brave cold and wind and even a light snow and keep blooming, heedless of impending doom. And yet they are the softest-looking flower, as velvety as that habit you wear, Miss Jennings, and even softer to the touch.”
“You should write a poem,” Priscilla interjected, “about the noble pansy.”
“I will leave that to you, as the literary talent in the neighborhood. How is my story coming?”
Mr. Belmont was talking to Priscilla again, holding a true conversation with the child and drawing her out in subtle, easy degrees. Priscilla regaled him with myriad details of the draft she’d penned for him—a draft that had yet to reach its mandatory happy ending.
“What of your mama’s story?” Mr. Belmont asked as Priscilla wound down. “Are you planning an epic tale for her?”
He appeared happy to dawdle along at a pace comfortable for Priscilla, which allowed Theresa to take in the surroundings. Belmont House sat on its hill, a serene testament to the last century’s passion for landscaping. Oaks and maples were turning golden about the house, shedding a carpet of luminous leaves on lush green grass.
Chrysanthemums provided dashes of russet, white, and yellow, and a simple circular fountain added the soft splash of water to a pretty day. Nothing about Belmont House suggested boiling oil or pitched battle. Mr. Belmont’s estate was a lovely haven, a well-cared-for home.
Though rather a lot of home for one man.
“Mama’s story will be hard to write,” Priscilla said. “She is my mama, after all, and I am not sure a mama can have exciting adventures.”
Mr. Belmont smiled at Theresa over the child’s head, his expression managing that blend of naughty and bland known only to parents in the company of small children.
“When you solve that puzzle, you will be able to buy your own castle on the proceeds of your writing, child.”
“You are my exciting adventure, Priscilla,” Theresa said, because that was in every way the truth. “If you wrote the story for me and my brave and clever daughter, you might find the task easier.”
“Shall I do that? I could, you know. I could call it, ‘Princess Priscilla to the Rescue.’ Oh Mama!” She dropped the hands of both adults and raced up to the nearest fence. “Look at the lovely, lovely ponies!”
She was trying to clamber up the fence rails when Mr. Belmont swung her up to the top board and kept a hand on her waist.
“I have seven in all,” he said. “The oldest is over there, by the gate, and her name is Dandelion, or Dandy…” He described each pony, including the origin of the animal’s name, its breeding, and its current state of health.
Priscilla listened, rapt, through the entire recitation. “Can I pet them?”
May I? Though what mattered grammar when a child was falling in love?
“They would be offended if you didn’t.” Mr. Belmont lied well, in the parental sense, though his equine piglets had barely looked up from their single-minded attempts to ingest every blade of grass in the paddock.
He vaulted over the fence in a single athletic maneuver his sons had likely been trying to emulate for years, grabbed Priscilla off the top rail, affixed her to his hip, and approached old Dandy.
“Dandy doesn’t see well,” Mr. Belmont said. “I am careful to always speak fairly loudly—Miss Jennings, my humble apologies, I should have at least opened the gate for you.”
He sounded genuinely distressed as Theresa climbed over the fence, a complicated undertaking in a riding habit.
“One doesn’t interrupt a man holding forth about one of his passions,” she said, shaking out her skirts.
“May I get down, please?”
For him, Priscilla recalled her grammar.
“Of course.” He set her on her feet, produced several hunks of carrot from
his pocket, and let Priscilla make what friends she might—or her carrots might.
“To see these old rascals is shamefully gratifying.” Mr. Belmont said. “I never get a chance to prose on about their adventures with the boys, to see the magic that the mere sight of an equine can light in a small child’s eyes.”
He watched Priscilla with such wistfulness, Theresa wondered what, in truth, he was seeing.
“When was the last time you paid a call on them?”
“With company? Not since Remington and Christopher walked here with me the evening before the boys’ departure this summer.”
Which suggested without company, he came here often—perhaps in search of company?
“So who is this?” Theresa asked.
“That is Gowain,” Mr. Belmont replied, petting a portly little piebald. “Because he belonged to Richard, my youngest, his name was transmogrified into ‘Go Away’ by the older two. He and Richard had their revenge, though. Gowain is faster than lightning and will jump anything you put him to, rather like Richard.”
“May I ride Gowain?” Priscilla asked, obviously taken with the idea of being fast as lightning and able to jump anything.
“If you ladies will accompany me back to the house, we can talk about that while we enjoy a glass of lemonade or cider.”
Priscilla looked over the little herd, clearly torn between the desire to stay with the ponies and the chance to discuss how she might ride them.
“Lemonade would be lovely,” Theresa replied, lest winter arrive before Priscilla made up her mind.
“One of my favorites,” the squire rejoined gravely, winking.
Oh, the scamp…. Theresa wanted to be stern with him, to discourage such blatant teasing, but he was so friendly with it, and the day was proving to be so otherwise enjoyable that she simply couldn’t locate her usually endless supply of sternness.
It was only a wink, after all.
Her first wink in years.
Mr. Belmont led them to the nearby gate, and when he’d seen both ladies through, Priscilla tore off along the hedgerow, bent on picking purple asters closer to the house.
“My apologies for jumping with her earlier,” Mr. Belmont said as soon as Pricilla was out of earshot. “I used to tear all over the countryside with the boys, and they loved it.”
“Did their mother love it?”
His smile dimmed as Priscilla ran riot along the hedgerow. “Matilda was something of a hoyden. If I had one child up with me, she’d have the other two on a lead line. She taught them to row, went fishing with us, and hiked over every inch of the property with us. The way she threw herself into bucolic pursuits with her sons was one of her endearing qualities, and the boys loved her for it as well.”
“She sounds like a wonderful woman.” What would it have been like to have such a mother? “Not a lady cowed by the dictates of proper society.”
Mr. Belmont’s smile disappeared altogether, leaving a serious, even bleak countenance in its wake.
“Far better for her, if she had been more respectful of those dictates, and for those who cared about her as well.”
For once, Theresa wished she had taken her escort’s arm. Mr. Belmont walked along beside her, his long legs adjusting their stride to hers, his hands linked behind his back. He gave off an odd tension, one Theresa might have better been able to interpret were they arm in arm.
“I hardly think that hiking and fishing on one’s own property should earn a mother approbation, Mr. Belmont.”
He stopped, his gaze going past Theresa’s shoulder, back in the direction they’d come.
“If you are in this area for any length of time, Miss Jennings, you will soon be informed, for the kindest possible reasons of course, that my oldest made his appearance a scant six months after Matilda and I said our vows. The boy already stands over six feet and is hardy as a goat. The notion of a premature birth in his case is preposterous.”
“You anticipated your vows.” Would that Theresa’s own transgressions had been half so mundane. “It happens, and you and your bride were quite young.”
“I did not anticipate my vows.” Mr. Belmont’s tone wasn’t mean, but it was… angry. “I was seventeen, Matilda eighteen, and while your conjecture is the locally accepted version of the tale, she came to me bearing another man’s child.”
The meaning of his words took a moment to sort itself out in Theresa’s mind. The day was too pretty, the man too proud of his sons. He had a herd of pensioner ponies, for pity’s sake, and he missed his sons so badly she could feel the ache of it.
Theresa did not want to hear this confidence, and yet, Mr. Belmont’s marital history explained some of his extraordinarily tolerant attitude.
Also the hint of disquiet Theresa detected behind his smiles and cordial manners.
“I might as well tell you the whole of it, for you’re too much a lady to inquire,” he said. The ponies went on munching grass and swishing their tails, while Theresa wanted to slap her hand over Mr. Belmont’s mouth.
She was not a lady in any sense, but Mr. Belmont needed to tell her this sad tale. For once, her past created privilege rather than burden, so she plucked a sprig of aster and bit back words of sympathy.
“When Matilda’s circumstances became known to her parents and her older sister,” Mr. Belmont went on, “the women in the family put their heads together and came up with yours truly—a second cousin once removed, at least—as a convenient groom. I was not coerced, precisely, but Matilda came with a dowry, was honest about her situation, and I was seventeen.”
“What has your age to do with it, other than to connote a general lack of worldly experience?” Though at seventeen, Theresa had been woefully familiar with vice for a baron’s granddaughter.
Mr. Belmont plucked the asters from her hand and tucked them into the lapel of her riding jacket.
His presumption had the brisk competence of a man who’d taken small boys to Sunday services, and yet… Theresa was pleased by the gesture.
He surveyed his work and went back to studying the ponies. “I had enough worldly experience to comprehend that a wife could afford a randy young fellow certain comforts, and because Matilda was quite pretty, and no virgin, my judgment was not objective.”
He’d been seventeen. Theresa had known—though not quite in the biblical sense—young fellows down from university. They were a plague on society whose lustful inclinations were dampened only by liberal applications of strong drink or stupid wagers.
Priscilla had rambled halfway back to the house, a veritable sheaf of wildflowers in her arms. She could turn around any moment, and then this exchange would be over.
“In certain matters, Mr. Belmont, few of us have objective judgment, at any age, much less before our majority.”
A beat of fraught silence went by, while Theresa wished she could offer Mr. Belmont words of greater comfort. Though why should he accept her absolution when she couldn’t forgive herself for the same lack of judgment?
He touched the little wild flowers gracing Theresa’s lapel. “Did you love him?” he asked softly.
Chapter Five
“I hate to see you so worrit, young Beckman.”
Beckman continued raking the barn aisle, his rhythm never faltering, because Jamie Hannigan lived to disrupt those intent on completing a task.
“You can tell I’m worried from how I rake a barn aisle, old man?”
Jamie was apparently worried, and when Jamie fretted, he muttered and stomped until somebody investigated or the horses grew restless.
“It’s the sound, ye see, my boy.”
Beckman saw only a paisley pattern in the dirt, like successive waves approaching the shore. Horses and people would obliterate that pattern within fifteen minutes, though creating the design twice a day still gave Beckman satisfaction.
A tidy barn was a safe barn.
“The sounds and speed of the rake,” Jamie clarified, hoisting himself onto a trunk. “You have one rhythm for thinking,
another for fuming, and another for gnawing on a problem.”
“Maybe I’m worried the stalls won’t get mucked, because you sit about on your skinny arse listening to rakes when you ought to be working.”
Nobody loved a good row more than Jamie, and the horses had learned to ignore him most of the time.
“You young people work until you drop, then boast of your exhaustion. When you’re my age, you’ll know better. Your brother will be fine.”
Well, damn.
“Nick knows London like you know the back of a horse. Of course, he’ll be fine.” Nick would not be happy in the refined company in London though, and that was a shame for a man doomed to inherit an earldom.
“You will manage without him too,” Jamie said, taking a pipe from his pocket. He dug in the bowl of the pipe using a nail secreted in some other pocket, and dumped the leavings on Beck’s tidy aisle. “We’ll miss him though. The horses miss him. Squire was right about that.”
Beckman raked over the small mess Jamie had created. “You’ve been tossed on your head a few too many times. Nick and I have been separated on many previous occasions, often for months.” With oceans between them, if Beck had been able to arrange it. “Nick is probably relieved to be away from the stink of horses.”
The smell of the stable had become a comfort to Beckman, oddly enough, and the company of the horses soothing.
“I’ve been tossed on every part of me a man can land on, young sir, and I came up ready to ride another race every time. If you’re not worrit about your brother, then what’s troublin’ ye?”
“Muck me a stall, Jamie Hannigan, or you’ll be the one with something to worry about.”
A stall set fair by James Michael Patrick Hannigan was tidier than a parson’s parlor, a work of art in Beck’s eyes, and in the horses’.
“You need the practice, lad, though I’ll grant you, you’ve improved. Some.” Jamie lifted his boots so Beck could rake beneath them, but the older man wouldn’t leave his perch until Beck confessed a credible worry.
“Maybe I’m uneasy about the baron’s sister, going off without a groom in Matthew Belmont’s company.”
Matthew Page 6
