CHAPTER TWO
“Cousin, do you suppose a man who is seven minutes late means anything by it?”
Mrs. Dalton sat at the little writing table with her spectacles low on her nose and three letters of condolence spread before her like a campaign. Her quill moved steadily across the page.
“Mm,” she said.
Ellen glanced over her shoulder. “That is not an answer.”
“It is the answer most questions deserve when asked before noon.”
“It is nearly twelve.”
“Then perhaps the question may improve by luncheon.”
Ellen turned back to the roses, though the roses were behaving abominably.
The late ones always did. She had cut them herself that morning from the last of the bushes in the narrow scrap of garden behind the house, the few brave blooms that remained after autumn had begun threatening everything tender.
They smelled of nothing and bruised if handled with any firmness, and she was arranging them in the blue jug for the third time because arranging roses gave a lady’s hands employment while her heart behaved like an undisciplined schoolgirl.
The fault lay entirely with the door.
Lieutenant Vance had sent a note. He meant to call at twelve. It was now eleven minutes past, and Ellen had counted each one of those minutes with a composure that would have deceived no one who cared to look closely.
“Cousin,” she said, moving one pale rose from the left side of the jug to the right, “now it is eleven minutes.”
Mrs. Dalton blotted a line. “Then I must congratulate you upon your arithmetic.”
“Men are late for reasonable causes, are they not?”
“Frequently.”
“Regiments move. Orders arrive. Horses lose shoes. Colonels detain people. There are a great many explanations for eleven minutes.”
“There are more explanations than there are punctual men.”
Ellen frowned at a rose that had the insolence to droop. “You make it sound very ordinary.”
“My dear, lateness is one of the commonest forms of masculine self-expression.”
“He was once an hour late,” Ellen said, lowering her voice though no one had asked her to. “He arrived breathless and so sorry that one could hardly object to anything. I believe I forgave him before he was through the door.”
“I remember.”
Ellen looked back quickly. “Do you?”
“I remember that you pretended to be greatly offended and then gave him the better tea.”
“I did no such thing.”
“You gave him the tea in the silver caddy.”
“That was because the other had gone stale.”
“Naturally.”
Ellen returned to the jug before her face could betray her. The rose in her fingers trembled, which was very unfair of it. It had no business telling tales.
He had dropped away over the summer.
She allowed the thought to touch her, only briefly, the way one might touch the rim of a dish fresh from the hearth and then decide to be sensible.
Three months without a line after the family’s troubles had gone about town, and she had filled the silence with reasons on his behalf, kind ones and busy ones and military ones, the sort that kept his silence from curdling into cruelty.
Then, in September, a note had arrived.
No apology, no explanation, nothing that acknowledged the three months at all. She had read it five times before breakfast and had asked nothing, because asking would have meant wanting an answer, and she had wanted the note more.
A knock sounded at the street door.
Ellen’s hand closed too tightly around the stem.
Mrs. Dalton’s quill paused. “There, you see. Either your lieutenant has arrived, or the butcher has become uncommonly dramatic.”
“He is not my lieutenant.”
“Then your arithmetic has been wasted on a stranger.”
“Cousin.”
“I am writing to a bereaved woman, Ellen. Allow me one amusement.”
The heavy tread of the footman's boots sounded in the hall. Ellen heard the door open. She heard a masculine voice, low and familiar enough to make her breath disappear. The morning-room door, which she had left open by accident twice and on purpose the third time, filled all at once with red.
“Miss Middleton.”
Lieutenant Vance bowed.
He had come in his regimentals. Of course he had. He knew she liked them, though she had never said so, and he stood half a moment in the doorway as if the world had been generous enough to frame him for her particular benefit.
“Forgive me,” he said, with that warm, easy smile that made apologies sound almost like compliments. “I am told so often that I am never punctual that I have begun to fear it is a settled feature of my character, such as the color of my hair.”
Ellen set down the rose before she could disgrace herself by holding it too tightly. “It is a fault, Lieutenant. I shall add it to the list.”
His eyes brightened. “You keep a list?”
“Of faults? Naturally.”
“I had hoped I was past the stage of lists.”
“That would require fewer faults.”
“How severe you are this morning.”
“How late you are this morning.”
He laughed softly and came into the room, bringing with him a brightness that seemed to alter the faded paper, the thin fire, and the poor tired roses all at once.
“Good morning, Lieutenant,” Mrs. Dalton said to her letters without rising.
“Mrs. Dalton.” He bowed to her with the same handsome warmth that cost him nothing and pleased her entirely. “You are a vision of industry. I tremble to think what damage England might suffer if all ladies wrote with such purpose before luncheon.”
Mrs. Dalton looked over her spectacles. “England has survived worse than my correspondence.”
“I doubt it.”
“You may sit, since you have already flattered me.”
“I live in gratitude.”
He crossed to Ellen’s side and took her hand. His lips touched her knuckles and lingered a half-second past what propriety required. Then his thumb moved once along the inside of her wrist where the glove ended and the skin began.
Ellen forgot how breathing was meant to proceed.
“There,” he said, releasing her hand as if nothing in the world had happened. “I have been pardoned.”
“You have not.”
“No?”
“I am considering it.”
“Then I shall behave with exceptional charm until judgment is rendered.”
He sat without being asked, the way he did, and stretched his legs before him with the ease of a man who had no intention of leaving soon. Ellen wished, with a sudden foolishness that warmed her from throat to fingertips that the chair might keep him there by some defect of carpentry.
“Now,” he said, settling back, “you will not have heard about the colonel’s grey.”
“I will not.”
“Then my lateness has bought you something.”
“That depends upon the quality of the story.”
“It is a story of horsemanship, military dignity, and aquatic defeat.”
Mrs. Dalton’s quill paused. “Aquatic defeat?”
“Madam, I could not exaggerate the matter if I tried.”
Ellen bit the inside of her cheek. “Pray, continue.”
“You are aware,” Vance said, folding one hand over the other with absurd solemnity, “that the colonel keeps a grey gelding he cherishes a good deal better than either of his sons.”
“I was not aware, though I am prepared to believe it.”
“Seventeen hands of pure malice. A beast with the soul of a disappointed dowager and the temper of a French artilleryman.”
“Lieutenant,” Mrs. Dalton murmured, “do not malign dowagers. We have long memories.”
“I speak only of foreign dowagers, ma’am, and those safely beyond my acquaintance.”
Ellen laughed, though she tried to make it small.
Vance looked at her. “No, no, Miss Middleton. You must save your laughter until the colonel enters the trough.”
“The trough?”
“I have spoiled nothing. The trough was inevitable from the moment the horse was saddled.”
Mrs. Dalton set down her quill. “Now I am listening.”
Vance leaned forward a little, delighted with his audience. “This morning, as we passed the low gate by the paddock, the band struck up. The grey formed the settled opinion that the trumpet was a personal insult. The horse went one way at speed. The colonel went the other.”
“Over the gate?” Ellen asked.
“Over the gate.”
“No.”
“Into the water trough.”
“Lieutenant.”
“In front of two hundred men.”
Mrs. Dalton covered her mouth with two fingers, though her eyes had begun to shine.
Ellen pressed a hand to the edge of the table. “He did not.”
“He did. And here is the part that makes him a great soldier, Ellen, mark it.”
Her name, spoken so easily, touched the room like a match to paper.
Vance continued, apparently unaware that he had just rearranged her entire morning.
“He stood up out of that trough, streaming, with a lily pad on one shoulder, and he saluted. Held it. Made the whole parade hold it with him. Two hundred men at the salute to a colonel sitting in a horse trough, because what else, I put it to you, is a colonel to do?”
Ellen laughed before she meant to.
It came out bright and full, the sort of laugh she had not given the house in a fortnight.
She heard how loud it was in the quiet room and found, to her astonishment, that she did not care.
Let the hall hear it, and the old flowers, and the whole shabby house wake and remember that happiness had once known the way inside.
Vance watched her with such open pleasure that the laughter caught and softened in her throat.
“You will tell that badly to someone within the week,” he said, “and you will give me no credit for it.”
“I shall give you all the credit.”
“Shall you?”
“I shall say a very amusing officer told it to me.”
“A very amusing officer.” He placed a hand over his heart. “I am undone. Not handsome, not gallant, not dangerously compelling. Merely amusing.”
“You prefer dangerously compelling?”
“I prefer accuracy.”
Mrs. Dalton made a sound that might have been a cough and might have been laughter. “You prefer admiration, Lieutenant.”
“Madam, I am a soldier. Admiration is necessary to the uniform.”
“It is a pity punctuality was not issued with it.”
Ellen smiled down at the roses to hide how absurdly pleased she was. The room had become too bright, though the day outside remained grey. That was the trouble with Lieutenant Vance. He brought weather with him.
His voice lowered half a register. “You were painting, the last we spoke.”