* * *
At dinner, Kate said, “Ned, I can see that your visit with the Braithwaites did not go well. You look wretched.”
“You treated Caro abominably, Ned,” Jack said.
“Yes, and you are such an authority on princely behavior,” Kate said to her husband. “Who was it who left me, a bride of two days, on the public highway with a stinging rebuke and instructions to go home and meet your mother alone?”
Serena agreed. “It was not well done of you, Jack. Fortunately, Kate has backbone.”
“Caro has backbone, as well. But she knows her heart. She is inclined not to be careless with it. How do you think she got through a Season as an Incomparable without accepting any of the many offers she received?” Kate asked.
Ned looked up from his plate. “Offers? How many offers?”
“I did not count them, but there were more than a few. And the very day you rode off to Lady Sarah, she received two more.”
“What?” Ned said. His appetite vanished. He had never seriously considered that he might lose the woman to another.
Jack laughed. “Cleaverings' sons. One right after another. Turned ‘em both down.”
“The point is,” Kate said, “would she have done so if she had known Ned was not going to materialize as he had promised?”
“She would not have married either of those fribbles!” Ned said.
“Lord William is quite intent on having her. He stayed some time after his family left, and he is a regular correspondent. He is determined to be patient.”
Beverley felt a sick foreboding. “Do you really think she’d marry the chap? He’s mild as milk!”
The dowager said, “When one has been treated badly, milk can be very welcome. Comforting. Especially when it is warm, with a bit of honey stirred in.”
When the ladies left Jack and Ned to their port, he asked his friend, “Do you really think she will not have me at any price? I love her, Jack.”
“You, unfortunately, have been raised a duke, Ned. Not to put too fine a point on it, you think you have ducal prerogative in this instance. But you cannot make demands or use your rank in any way. Caro could have married me and been a marchioness. I offered for her, remember. But my rank held no charms for her. She had made up her mind we wouldn’t suit, though we had been the closest of friends forever. She intended to marry for love.” He swilled his port, looking down into the glass. “It is probably wrong for me to tell you this, but since you seem to be serious about her, there is something else you need to understand.”
“What is that, pray?”
“Caro has a secret.”
He raised an eyebrow and leaned forward.
“This is the second time you have broken her heart,” Jack said.
Ned closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He knew not what to think. “Damnation! I was courting her in the spring, but I had no idea at all that she favored me. There were so many of us.”
“She told Kate recently that she expected you to speak to her father back then. The next thing she knew, you were engaged. When you came to the house party, she threatened to leave. Your sudden engagement was the reason she cut her Season short.”
So he was the man Caro had said had left her heartbroken! It had been him she had been describing that morning when she lay abed with her sprained ankle. “I hadn’t a clue how she felt.” He ran a hand through his hair in frustration. “I have misunderstood everything from the start. Myself, Caro, Lady Sarah.”
“Would it have made a difference had you known?”
Using the bottom of his glass, he made a series of circles on the white tablecloth as he considered this. “Probably not,” he said grudgingly. “You see, I didn’t really know Caro then. Compared to the woman I thought Lady Sarah was, she seemed nothing more than a shallow beauty.”
“Pity.”
It was worse than a pity. Couldn’t Jack see that?
Ned reflected that in this case, his singlemindedness, which had before been an asset, was like to prove his ruin. But could it be an asset once again? Could he turn it toward winning Caro back?
One thing, at least, was in his favor. Twice, she had fallen in love with him. Unless someone else had taken over his place in her heart, she must have a tendre for him still, though it might be buried deep down.
He considered this all through cards with the ladies, the partaking of tea, and a game of billiards with Jack.
As they were racking their cues at the conclusion of three games, he said, “I must try to see her again. The butler will have had orders to close the door on me. Perhaps I can come upon her when she is on horseback. I used to see her riding in Rotten Row of a morning in London.”
Jack sat with one hip on the billiard table. “I have a better idea.”
“I am all ears, believe me.”
“Caro had a brother. They were very close growing up, but he went off to the Peninsula. Two years ago, he was killed. It was a ghastly thing. He lost a leg and then died from septicemia after he got home.” He paused, and Ned saw the pain in his eyes.
“You must have been friends.”
“We were. But he’d been at war for three years. I scarcely knew him when he returned. Nor did his family.”
“He had changed?”
“He was all nerves and bone. Irascible. Didn’t sleep at night. Cursed a blue streak. Then, one morning, he was found dead in his bed.” Jack sighed heavily as he came back to the present. “Any road, he is not buried in the churchyard, but in a little cypress grove where we all used to play as children. Caro brings flowers to his his grave every Sunday after morning services. Tomorrow is Sunday.”
“What a beastly thing. This war is such a wretched business.” Ned paused, trying to imagine poor Caro’s emotions at such a time. His death would have been terrible. “But, I could not intrude on her private grief!”
Jack slid off the table and pulled a cigar from his pocket. Clipping the end, he said, “There is a little folly on the slope she ascends to reach the grove. You could wait there, out of sight, and then appear before she ever gets to Johnny’s grave. I do not think she would consider that an intrusion.”
Ned mulled this over in his mind. It might be the only chance he had. He would have to plan what he was going to say very carefully.
Jack said, “I’ll ride you over there tomorrow morning, so you can at least see the place.”
“I’d be obliged.”
* * *
Ned lay awake into the night thinking about Caro’s brother and how his death must have affected her. She was certainly far from the haughty, untouchable creature he had thought her. She would have taken a wounded brother under her wing, would try to soothe and comfort him.
Did she view his death not only as an unmitigated tragedy, but as a personal failure? Perhaps that is why she was not presented until she was nineteen, making her two years older than most debutantes.
No matter what Jack had said, it still made him uneasy to intrude on her weekly pilgrimage.
* * *
Having consulted Kate on the wisdom of this plan, and having seen the grave in Jack’s company, Ned rode to the folly after Sunday services. It was an artificially ruined temple, damp and covered with vines. Walking his horse, he kept his eye on the slope down to the house. It grew warm, and flies buzzed around his mount’s head. He was hungry and thirsty. At some time after two o’clock, he saw Caro walking up the slope, head down, a bouquet of roses in her hands. Thoughts of food and drink fled. Mounting his horse, he kneed it into a canter as though he had been riding aimlessly across the hill. He cut across her path while she was still downhill from him, and then, as though seeing her for the first time, he reined his horse in and waited for her to approach.
“Good afternoon, Caro,” he said, infusing his voice with surprise. “Well met.”
She did not smile. In fact, her lips were clamped shut as she picked up her skirts and made to walk around his horse.
It took only a second for him to
abandon his original plan, opting instead for honesty.
“Jack told me of your brother’s sad death. You have my sympathy. I imagine it was a horrid ordeal for you.”
Caro appeared not to be listening. She had rounded his horse and was now proceeding up the hill past him. Dismounting, he led his horse as he trailed her. “Won’t you stay a moment and speak with me? I cannot bear for you to think I intentionally hurt you.”
Whirling on him, she said, “If you had a heart, you would see that I am scarcely in the mood for a discussion. But I do not think you thought of me at all that day, and that is what hurts. Nor did you ever think to send me a letter of explanation. My conclusion is that you are careless of other people’s feelings, your grace. I will never feel safe enough to entrust my heart to you again.” Looking him square in the face, she raised an eyebrow. “I am on the way to my brother. I want to be alone. Please go away.”
“Yes, of course. Forgive me,” he said as she turned away.
Her words not only excluded him from her grief but seemed to ban him from her life, as well. Ned watched the gallant little figure with the roses disappear into the small, sparse wood of cypress trees. Ned was afraid that he had just worsened his case. Even so, as he saw her disappear, his heart swelled with grief for her grief.
He knew a sudden certainty that staying in St. James-in-the-Wold was not going to advance his suit at present. He needed to take up the hand that he alone had dealt himself, acknowledging his own perverse priorities, and go home to Cornwall. The lady had dismissed him.
Slowly, he remounted his horse, turned it about, and began riding back to Northbrooke Park. He would begin his journey home the next day. But he had not retired from the field. He would win her trust again. He just didn’t know at the moment how that was to be done.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
IN WHICH OUR HEROINE SEEKS COUNSEL
Caro allowed her anger full rein as she approached Johnny’s marble monument among the cypresses. How could Jack have betrayed her most private tragedy to the duke with the evident aim of providing him another opportunity to harass her? And how could Beverley possibly have thought she would be receptive under such circumstances?
It was all to the good, however, for this time, she had no regrets after dismissing the duke. He was lessened in her eyes by his behavior.
Kneeling in front of the large monument, she traced its inscription with a finger, as she always did. It was the closest she could come to talking to Johnny.
Colonel John Sylvester Henry Braithwaite
1785-1808
Beloved Son and Brother
He gave his life for England
Caro sighed deeply, her breath welling up from an ache in her breast.
Oh, Johnny. How I miss you. You would be able to advise me in these difficult circumstances. At least, you would have been able to once, before you went to war. But all your wisdom and goodness and fairness were used up on that horrid Peninsula. I missed that far more than your leg. But I think the truth is that Johnny Braithwaite died in Spain.
As she unbound her bouquet of roses, she completed her ritual of scattering them across her brother’s grave. Giving the marble monument one last caress, she stood and began her walk out of the trees and down the hill to her home. Once there, she removed her bonnet and idly checked the post on the hall table. Another letter from Lord William. Could no one leave her in peace?
She was very glad that Elise and the duke would be coming for her next week to take her into Gloucestershire, where she would spend two weeks in the village of Chipping Campden producing her Gothic play with the boys from the orphanage.
Putting the letter into her pocket, she walked upstairs to her mother’s sitting room.
“Mother, let us deliver the rag dolls and sailboats to the children this afternoon.”
“Oh, Caro, darling, you are become so very earnest! You are in great danger of becoming an antidote, I think. I am looking at the latest fashion plates in La Belle Assemblée. Come sit by me and we will give some thought to your fall wardrobe. I am feeling so much better that I am longing to go up to London for the Little Season once you are back from Gloucestershire. This business with the duke has been very unfortunate. But there are plenty of suitable young men in London.”
On top of her recent encounter with the duke, the thought of enduring another Season, even the Little Season, was suddenly enough to cause her to look upon Lord William’s suit with more favor than she had heretofore done. Without even answering her mother, she took the vicar’s letter from her pocket and read it.
“My very dear Miss Braithwaite:
I write to tell you that I am settling in very well at the Vicarage, and, following your example, am expending some effort in getting to know the young people of the parish. I wanted to inquire whether you and the marchioness of Northbrooke would consider traveling to Devonshire and putting your Mother Goose play on here, featuring the youngsters from our parish. I am presently organizing a games day.
Father would love to have you to stay in Cleaverings Manor. He longs to consult with the marchioness about the identity of all the people in the portrait gallery!
I hope you will consider the invitation. I look forward to hearing from you soon.
Your very devoted:
Lord William Seaton
How clever of Lord William to appeal to her love of dramatics to lure her to Devonshire! He was proving to be a devoted and enterprising suitor. Caro’s spirits rose somewhat. Lord William had great advantages over the duke in being thoughtful and sharing her interests. Perhaps, in time, if she gave him some encouragement, she could learn to be contented with such a man.
Of course, she would never feel that heart-racing thrill at his nearness or see a look of mischief in his eyes, but perhaps those things were unnecessary for a tranquil, companionable marriage.
The thought, instead of making her feel better, shrouded her in gloom. Taking herself in hand, she sat down immediately to answer the letter.
Dear Lord William,
Thank you for your kind invitation. Perhaps next year we can plan to do a play in your parish. I would enjoy it very much. This August, however, I will be at an orphanage in Chipping Campden, helping to put on a play I have written called “The Horrible Haunting of Cranberry Manor.” It would be rather hair-raising for normal children, but these poor boys were raised in the East End of London and would not appreciate the subtle humor of Mother Goose!
I will be leaving for Gloucestershire next week with the Duke and Duchess of Ruisdell, who are coming to collect me. I do not know what accommodations are like in Chipping Campden, but you are very welcome to come to observe the play and the orphanage if you are interested in such things.
Very truly yours,
Miss Caroline Braithwaite
The following day, she was surprised to receive a morning call from Kate. She met her in the morning room.
“I wondered if I could get some cuttings from your mother’s garden, Caro. My neophyte garden is not doing as well as I could wish.”
“Certainly. Let us go into the still room and get some gardening gloves and shears.”
When they had been working for perhaps twenty minutes, gathering cuttings of a variety of annuals, Kate said, “I hope you will not eat me, but I also wanted to plead Ned’s case.”
“Oh, Kate. Please do not. I am determined to put him from my mind.”
“I know he annoyed you by intercepting you yesterday, but I need to tell you that it was Jack’s idea. And not a very good one.”
Caro sighed and collapsed on the low garden wall. “Oh, Kate, I am so confused. I do not know what to think.”
“Do you love Ned?”
“It is not that simple. He has caused me great heartache on two different occasions. He seems very careless of my emotions. Life with such a man would be miserable.”
“Let us try to look at this realistically, if we can,” Kate said. “On the first occasion you speak of, you know th
at he did not know of your feelings for him. You kept them secret from all of us.”
“That is right. But that does not mean it hurt any less.”
“Well, you have paid him in his own coin. Right now, he is as miserable and frustrated as a man can be. You are the only subject about which he is interested in speaking. Before he left this morning, Jack told him he was in danger of becoming a bore.”
Caro told her friend about her letter from Lord William.
“You cannot possibly be thinking of marrying him!” Kate exclaimed.
“Why not?”
“Caro, let me assure you that there are things you know nothing about. You want more than companionship and good works in a marriage.”
“I know you consider my good works a dead bore, but they have brought me a great deal of comfort since Johnny’s death. They keep me from dwelling on all the ugliness in life. They at least give me the illusion of doing something useful.”
Kate seemed to have no reply to this.
“I am very intrigued about the anonymous patron of this orphanage I am visiting,” Caro said. “Now, there is a gentleman with an active conscience and a creative means of doing some really important work in the world.”
“Oh, Caro. It is bound to be some fusty old Whig, or even a whole board of them.”
“Just the same, I am going to do my best to find out.”
“Caro, darling, sometimes I think you are unnatural. You are a young woman. An Incomparable. You only need to lift a finger to initiate a thrilling romance that could last for a lifetime.”
“I am not willing to pay for passion with misery. That is not a trade-off I will accept.”
“Just give Ned one more chance. There are things you and I do not know, but Jack does know all the particulars of the situation with Lady Sarah. He is sworn to secrecy, but tells me that his behavior was above reproach in all particulars. Should you not at least give him a chance to explain? I know you are attracted to him. And as a married woman, I can tell you that there are delights of which you are entirely unaware.”
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