Chapter 10
CHAPTER TEN
As soon as Bernard had climbed into the coach, Sorcha had wanted to pull the shades, seize him in an embrace, and suggest they run away together to Scotland. She had missed him, and even a retiring widow grew bored with Society’s entertainments. Even a settled mother of two could be lonely, and…
And besotted. Bernard had used the word honest, and now they were to court.
Of course they were. Sorcha had needed some time to adjust her thoughts—to have coherent thoughts at all—but Bernard had dared to posit what would likely have been obvious to any lady who’d never endured marriage to Lord Barclay Dolforth.
I have fallen in love with him. A mannerly, English, slightly shy bachelor who’d been hiding in an obscure Yorkshire parish and was now trying to hide in his commercial endeavors while doing the pretty for his ducal connections, while helping Sorcha sort out her nursery.
I have fallen in love with him, and he has... She did not dare think the rest of that notion.
“Are we there yet?” Bridget asked, gaze on the landscape beyond the window.
“Not yet, Bridge,” Jordy replied. “If we were there, we’d be out of this coach. I want to be a coachman when I grow up.”
Bridget stuck her tongue out at him. “I want to be a unicorn.”
Sorcha wanted to be private with Bernard in a large and comfy bed. She’d planned that much of their afternoon before Bernard’s request to court her. Her ambitions had been driven by a combination of desire, curiosity—how much of the vicar still dictated to the man?—and a growing case of nerves.
She’d never been a merry widow and hadn’t quite reconciled herself to embarking on that career with Bernard. He wasn’t the merry-widowing sort, though he was apparently the marrying sort.
From the backward-facing bench, Bernard sent her a commiserating smile.
“Those are our gateposts!” Bridget pointed out the window. “We’re here. I was right, and you were wrong, Jordy Dolforth. We’re here, and we are not out of the coach, so there.”
“Gloating becomes no one,” Sorcha said. “We will also be at Mirobello when the coach stops and we join your cousins, so you were both right.”
The Greer girls would travel out from Town with their mama, making the outing a sort of family garden party.
“We’ll play battledore,” Jordy said, “and Gilchrist will be on our team, and she will wallop stupid Annette with the shuttlecock.”
“A gentleman does not speak ill of a lady,” Bernard said, though Sorcha heard humor in the platitude. “Particularly not a lady in his own family.”
“Annette isn’t a lady yet,” Bridget observed as the coach tooled up the drive.
“She isn’t out, and she will not be out until next year.
Jordy should be allowed to speak ill of her until next year, even though he’s only saying the truth.
Annette is very silly. She says she could marry a prince, and then we would not be allowed to turn our backs to her. ”
“Her prediction is theoretically possible,” Bernard said. “You’d best conduct yourselves accordingly toward your lady cousins. They might all be princesses-in-waiting.”
“Then I will be a king!” Jordy grinned at his own faultless reasoning, stood, saluted, bowed, and toppled to the seat behind him when the coach rocked to a halt.
“A day in the country was apparently overdue for all concerned,” Sorcha observed ten minutes later. She and Bernard stood on the sunny back terrace as the children went racing around the formal parterres, which some genius had laid out in a perfect pattern to accommodate a game of fox and geese.
Coraline’s brood had arrived a quarter hour earlier, along with their governess. Gilchrist, who’d chosen to ride with the hampers in the second coach, took the first shift as referee.
“A day in the country was a wonderful idea.” Bernard winged his arm. “One forgets just how gratifying bright sunshine can be.”
One forgot how gratifying good company could be.
Sorcha let her mind wander along the prospect of years with Bernard—his wickedly subtle humor, his inherent sense of calm, his decency and affection.
Why, oh, why, had she settled for a strutting, self-important lordling when men like Bernard were to be found instead?
Because she’d been told to settle for the lordling, of course. Told that Barclay was the only option for a girl who had any sense of duty toward her family or her future.
And because men like Bernard were more precious than rubies and twice as rare. The more she knew of him, the more he fell into the too-good-to-be-true category, and MacPhee had had very terse words for fellows of that ilk.
Poor, dear MacPhee.
“I’ll show you the house,” Sorcha said, wrapping a hand around Bernard’s arm. “Mirobello isn’t half so grand as some of its neighbors, but I’ll be able to heat the place should I ever need to dwell here.”
“You haven’t considered renting it out?”
“I did rent it out occasionally until this year. Coraline asked me not to let it. The family might need it to host events over the next several years.”
“The family. Right. Do you like Coraline?”
They passed into the house, a newish edifice that had been enlarged along with many others in the neighborhood during the past century.
As London had grown smokier and more squalid, Richmond had arisen as a patch of countryside within frolicking distance of Town.
Market gardens had sprung up, as had the occasional country showplace and rural retreat.
“I don’t truly know Coraline,” Sorcha replied. “I respect that she’s had her hands full with Tallister and four girls, but she seems to relish the challenges. The library is this way, and I suspect you will want to see that first.”
The library was a cozy study by ducal standards, about twenty-four feet by eighteen feet. The outer wall was graced with tall windows, as befit a space where light would be at a premium, but the ceiling was a mere ten feet, making the room feel more domestic and less grand.
Books were shelved along most of the inside wall, and two hearths—one at the far end, one halfway down the outside wall—would provide sufficient warmth even in winter.
The carpets were cheerfully floral Axminsters, the art a series of bucolic landscapes.
The obligatory set of French doors opened directly onto the terrace.
The furniture was both elegant and comfortable. Sorcha liked the color scheme—burgundy and amethyst appointments against sapphire blue walls and eggshell trim. The palette was pretty, did not show dirt, and avoided the trite pastels common in the public spaces of grander houses.
“Window seats,” Bernard said. “I have long admired the utility of window seats and spent much of my boyhood occupying them.”
“You hid from your tutors behind the curtains?” Sorcha certainly had.
“I was not a hiding-from-my-tutors sort of child. I was studious. From a young age, I was told I was meant for the Church, and churchmen are to be studious.”
The windows faced the back terrace, where governesses, footmen, or other spectators might bide.
Sorcha was abruptly seized with the impulse to close the drapes and hug the stuffing out of Bernard.
He was all that was manly and desirable and wondrous, but from a young age, he’d also been expected to uphold duty at the expense of his own capacity for joy.
What a dreary patch of common ground. “Let’s have a look around upstairs,” she said. “From the east side of the house, we have a lovely view of the Thames.”
The most commodious bedrooms occupied that wing, and the views were the best the house had to offer.
I am dithering.
If what Sorcha had heard in any number of retiring rooms was true, a widow would approach a tryst with confidence, humor, and honest lust, but what, exactly, did those attributes look like on a fine spring afternoon?
“The original house became the western half of the present edifice,” she said as they climbed the curving main staircase.
“The eastern half is the modern addition. The kitchens and pantries lie on the east side, while the western foundation holds the wine cellar, root cellar, coal cellar, and so forth. A great-great-uncle of the present duke did a marvelous job with the expansion.”
“The house makes a lovely impression,” Bernard said as they passed an alcove with the requisite Roman bust, thriving fern, and reading chair. “Sorcha, are you nervous?”
“Yes.” With Bernard, only honesty would do. “Also determined. I have been a paragon, Bernard. A paragon of ignorance and propriety. The role grows tedious and lonely.”
“Lonely. In recent years, I have begun to feel as if the inner and outer man live at a greater and greater distance from each other. I’d watch myself partaking of somebody’s overcooked roast at yet another Sunday supper, all the talk of harvest or plowing or planting, and there I’d be, holding up my portion of the conversation, complimenting the kitchen, while mentally… ”
“You were suffocating?”
“Hibernating, let’s say. Watching and wondering, ‘Is this what the next forty years of my life will entail, this polite lie, this little performance? Do no harm. Be a friend to all. Want for nothing. Have no expressed discontents or ambitions beyond keep Mama as content as she could be.’ All the while, I knew that such maunderings were in themselves evidence of vast privilege. ”
“At least you were pondering your situation over a dried-up roast. I’d ruminate like that while my husband…” Sorcha fell silent, not out of loyalty to Barclay, but rather, out of pity for Barclay’s very young wife.
Bernard took her in his arms, and Sorcha hugged him back.
“I have missed you, Bernard. I did not know who you were, or where you were, but you should have been in my life, and now you are, and I fear the day when that’s no longer the case.”
“You have me to keep, if that’s your wish, and I am delighted to think you might be mine to keep as well.”