Chapter 2 #2
“Yes, your trunks. I will have them delivered to my home.”
She tried to say no, but he was already stalking off to find someone to do it.
She followed him. “No. I told you I don’t want to go with you.”
“I am not giving you a choice. You are Diana’s baby sister and I mean to look after you.”
“I don’t need looking after! And I am not a baby!”
He stopped at that and turned to glare at her. She saw unyielding conviction in his eyes and noted the lines around his mouth. The lines gave him the appearance of a man stuck in a permanent frown.
Those lines had not existed fifteen years ago—at least she did not remember them—nor had they existed in her dreams of him.
She did her best to appear unperturbed by all that had occurred, and began to think that maybe she should count herself lucky to be spared having to marry him today.
“I see that you are still as headstrong as ever,” Adam said sharply.
His comment struck her hard. She hadn’t thought Adam remembered anything about her, much less the fact that she had always been somewhat willful and impetuous.
Then she recalled all the times Diana and Adam had gone for walks across the moors, wanting to be alone. Diana would beg Madeline to go home, but she was too young to understand why, so she had argued with Diana and followed them anyway.
So that’s what Adam remembered about her. She was nothing but the troublesome little sister.
Madeline simply stood there, saying nothing, waiting for him to realize that this was madness, and to give in and agree to leave her behind with the Ripleys.
To her surprise, he didn’t. He merely rephrased his intentions, in an obvious effort to win the argument.
“Miss Oxley. Please forgive me and allow me to begin again.” He removed his hat and bowed slightly at the waist. “I genuinely wish for you to come to my home and stay, as my guest. As I said, my daughter-in-law is confined to her room. She will be very disappointed if you do not come. In addition, both my daughter and my youngest son could use some instruction in reading and arithmetic. You mentioned that you have some experience in teaching?”
“Yes,” she stammered, before she had a chance to think about it.
“Well then. It’s settled.” He started off again to fetch a man to deliver the trunks, and Madeline stood there in the middle of the courtyard, feeling depleted and exhausted, and as if she had just been manipulated all over again.
* * *
Sitting in the buggy beside Madeline, Adam flicked the lines and began the trip home along Cumberland Ridge, laboring to block out everything he had expected and hoped for today.
Of course, he couldn’t. Inside he was reeling with a mixture of disappointment and rage.
Over the past few weeks, since the letter had arrived saying his “bride” was on her way, crossing an ocean to be with him, Adam had somehow managed to fall in love with Diana all over again.
He’d spent too many hours remembering how she’d made him feel years ago, how the sight of her lovely face had brought him to his knees.
She was the first woman he had ever loved; they had been young and desperate for each other and had wanted to be together every minute of every day for the rest of their lives.
God, how he’d loved her—with all the fiery, intense passion of his youth.
No one had known him like she had, and he’d thought he’d known her deeply, too.
He had. All these years later, he still believed it.
They had once told each other everything, expressed every feeling and desire.
He’d held her in his arms and wanted to be with her forever.
Unfortunately, forever hadn’t lasted very long.
There had been no warning that the end was coming.
No disagreements or falling out of love.
No natural conclusion. She had simply informed him one day that she had decided to marry another.
He still remembered how she’d cried on his shoulder, which only made him love her more than ever.
Of course, through the years, he had come to understand why she’d made that choice.
How could she not? Adam was the third son of a tenant farmer—a prosperous one, yes, but by no means anything close to gentry, and with no hope of ever becoming a landowner.
Diana had married a baronet. She had chosen sensibly, as any prudent young woman would have done.
The memories these past few weeks, believing that she wanted him back, had stirred Adam’s blood and made him feel young again, as if their lifetime apart were a mere heartbeat.
Ever since he’d learned of her husband’s death and known that she was free, he hadn’t been able to stop thinking of her.
And when he let his mind return to those intimate, glorious moments they had shared in their youth, it seemed like yesterday.
Now, sitting next to Diana’s younger sister, who had been a child the last time he’d seen her, Adam felt more ancient than ever, and more pathetic to have been foolishly dreaming about Diana, the one who always seemed to slip through his fingers.
Strange, how Adam thought that after all these years, their coming together again was some kind of romantic destiny.
A ridiculous fantasy, indeed.
“Where is your home?” Madeline asked, jolting him out of his thoughts. “Is it far?”
He pointed straight ahead. “Farther along this ridge, on the hillside.”
She sat up straighter to see as far as she could, and he sensed she was fighting the urge to stand up in the moving buggy.
He tried to stop thinking of Diana, when there was no point torturing himself. Instead, he gazed at the lush green landscape in all directions. “Quite a view from here, don’t you think?”
Madeline gave him a cool, brief glance that told him she was going to reply only because it was the polite thing to do.
Obviously, she was still upset over what had occurred, and rightly so, he supposed.
It had been an awkward scene in front of her traveling companions.
Awkward for both of them, for if he was honest about it, he had been an ogre.
Lord, when had he become this ill-natured? It had happened so gradually over the years, he hadn’t really noticed it until he was here, face-to-face with someone from his past. Someone who had known the man he once was.
“Is that farmland down there?” she asked.
At least she was willing to make an effort. He supposed he should do the same.
“They’re salt marshes. Everything down there is dyked.”
She stared in silence at the velvet green vistas below and the dark spruce forests on the uplands. Above them, white clouds sailed quickly across the vast blue sky.
“Your sons must be a help to you,” she said.
“I couldn’t do it without them.”
He turned his gaze to her feminine profile and stared at her for a long moment.
Her cheeks were delicately carved, her lips full.
Her eyes had the look of girlish fascination at the unfamiliar world around her.
She was such a child, yet she had left her home and crossed an ocean with the expectation of becoming his wife.
His wife! Diana’s baby sister. She had thought she would meet his sons as their future stepmother.
Good Lord. Did she know that Jacob, his stepson, was only four years younger than she?
With that thought, a tremor of unease coursed through him. She couldn’t actually be brokenhearted, could she? In a sense, he had rejected her romantically, and told everyone within hearing range that she was not the one he’d wanted.
He considered saying something about it—offering an apology perhaps?—then he decided that it would just be rubbing salt in the wounds, and he should leave it be. There was no point dwelling on it. He would let her enjoy the view.
At least there had been no true, deep-rooted romance between them. In fact, she was probably relieved to be spared marrying a man she barely knew. A man almost twice her age.
Yes, what was done was done, and there was no sense dragging the uncomfortable circumstances out any longer. All this would be straightened out soon enough, for he was not yet ready to give up on Diana.
* * *
Madeline sat back in the rolling carriage, gazing in a detached way at the windswept landscape she had thought would be her home.
It was everything she had dreamed of, ripe for an adventure, and the reality of that only made her feel worse—as if her dreams had been mangled and mashed in front of her eyes and now all she could do was accept it.
Adam drove the carriage down the slope of the ridge and into the thick spruce forest where all was shaded and quiet and sheltered from the wind.
Little more than a narrow bridle path was all they had for a road, and only the sounds of the horse’s hooves thumping and the carriage wheels rolling over the ground, snapping twigs, filled the silence.
An uneasy feeling closed in around Madeline. What would become of her? She was an ocean away from her familiar world of moors and dales and meandering stone walls, and she knew no one here except for Adam and the people from the ship. She had no family.
Not that she’d had any family that she could depend upon back in Yorkshire, either, but at least she knew the countryside. Here, she could get lost in these deep, unfathomable forests or swallowed by a bear, God forbid.
She squeezed her pink-and-silver guinea purse into a ball in her hands. Partly in fear, partly in fury.
“Are you all right, Miss Oxley?” Adam asked, surprising her.
She’d thought she was more proficient at hiding her feelings. She would have to do better.
“I am perfectly fine, Mr. Coates.”
“You don’t look fine.”
She took a deep breath, not sure how to reply. “I was just thinking about my future and where I will go after this.” And I’ve never felt more alone in my entire life.
“I think the best thing is for you to return to your father in Yorkshire.”
“I would rather not,” she said.
He was quiet a moment. “Do you think that’s wise?”
How was she to explain that she’d left Yorkshire because she’d been ruined by an outrageous, unfounded sham of a scandal, and her father had made no effort to defend her?
After this little debacle, she realized he had been more determined to get rid of her than she’d thought.
And more determined to keep Diana at his side.
“I will be frank with you,” Adam said. “There isn’t much here for a young, unmarried woman.
Very few settlers can afford a live-in governess and the chances of finding work, outside of keeping house for someone, are slim.
The winters are long and severe—the icy winds over the marsh can take a bite out of your skin if you’re not careful.
And the mosquitoes…well, I guarantee they’ll come close to driving you mad.
Their bite feels like a hot needle prick in your skin, and it swells up like a big boil for days afterward and itches insufferably. ”
“Sure you are exaggerating.”
He inclined his head at her. “Just wait and see. In a month, you might be tempted to jump into the muddy Tantramar just to escape them. Sometimes, they’re worse than a black cloud around your head and—”
She held up a hand. “All right, all right. You’ve made your point, Mr. Coates, but I am not going home. I don’t know what I will do, but don’t worry, I will find some means to make my way. If not here, then perhaps in Halifax.”
“There’s no road to Halifax,” he said. “It’s all Indian trails and bridle paths.”
She huffed in frustration. “What would you have me do, then? Go home on the next ship? Go home to a father who wanted me gone so badly that he deceived both of us to get rid of me?”
Adam removed his hat and ran a hand over his dark, backswept hair. “You don’t know that.”
“You said you asked him for Diana’s hand. The man could read.”
The horses snorted and tossed their heads. “Well, perhaps he simply thought it should be your turn. Diana had already been married. I doubt he was that determined to get rid of you.”
Madeline chose not to correct him on that point. He didn’t need to know the truth, and at least he was no longer insinuating that this scheme was her doing.
“I still think it would be in your best interest to return to Yorkshire and be with your father,” he told her. “Cumberland is no place for a young woman alone.”
“Thank you. I will consider it,” she replied, just to end the discussion.
A few minutes later, she watched a brown squirrel shimmy across an evergreen bough overhead and leap onto a taller tree. Then she turned to Adam.
“May I ask how you learned about Diana’s widowhood?” Madeline was curious about how this deplorable situation had come to pass.
“News makes its way over here eventually. And I may have made inquiries about her over the years.”
Inquiries. Beautiful Diana. Men were always making inquiries….
Madeline gazed at Adam’s mature face beside her, and even now, after all that had transpired, her childish heart found it difficult to believe that she was actually sitting beside him, alone here in the forest, their thighs bumping every so often.
She felt an unwelcome, impetuous thrill over it, and a twinge of hope that perhaps one day, he might forget about Diana and see Madeline differently.
Her skin tingled beneath her dress, and she wished she could throttle the sensation. She did not wish to begin fantasizing again about this man who was not what she remembered. She would only wind up getting hurt, for she had yet in her life to experience otherwise.
“Did you love her that much, then?” Madeline hoped her tone hadn’t revealed how hurt she was over all this, but she wanted to hear how he felt.
No. After that thigh-bumping thrill, she needed to hear it.
He clicked his tongue at the horses. “Yes.”
Madeline fought to crush an unwelcome pang of jealousy.
Adam continued. “And I still wish to marry her. Perhaps you could help me.”
I beg your pardon? You want me to help you?
She tried to keep her voice light, to sound obliging. “How?”
“You could give me her address in London. I plan to notify my solicitor there, and if Diana agrees, I will have him arrange a proxy marriage. I want no mistakes this time.”
Feeling very tired all of a sudden, Madeline nodded. She knew that Diana had been bored and lonely since her husband passed away. If it was her whim, she would soon be sailing into the muddy waters of Cumberland Basin on the very next ship from England—as Adam’s wife.
As for Madeline, there was no sense harboring any secret hopes to the contrary. It was more than clear to her now that her dream of becoming Mrs. Adam Coates was quite thoroughly dead. She would have to find a way to move on.