Chapter 19
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Same Day
Notfelle Estate, England
Kitty’s heart was in flight and her limbs fast and light as she leapt over a hole in Notfelle’s drive.
As close as one could ever come to flying, she raced up the front steps and into the timbered and paneled hall.
Julian adored her. This revelation she had repeated at least a thousand times since quitting the wood.
Adored her. More than she knew. And if it were more than he cared to admit, then his adoration must be vast. Limitless like hers.
Clara hurried out from the parlor, her hands fidgeting at her lavender skirt. “Your father has been asking for you.”
Sir Jeffrey barked her name from beyond the parlor. Kitty scraped her half-boots on the slab stone floor, sorry she hadn’t entered from the rear court. She had been careless. Too elated. That Sir Jeffrey was to address her directly, instead of through Clara, boded ill.
Straightening her shoulders, Kitty tread through the parlor, its walls bare where precious tapestries had been stripped and sold, and halted at the study’s arched door.
She avoided looking at the antlers, the feathered and furry victims fixed to the walls and littering the tabletops and floor.
Hard to do because behind Sir Jeffrey’s stringy grey hair where he sat sideways at his desk with a gun on his lap was a badger skeleton.
“Where have you been?” he demanded, a scratched quizzing glass at his eye.
All the joy of the day vanished.
“I visited Mrs. Markel,” she lied.
“Who is Mrs. Markel?”
Sir Jeffrey couldn’t be bothered to know any of their tenants unless he suspected them poaching his game. Kitty saw to collecting their rents, visiting them monthly, delivering meals from their meager stores when illness visited or children were born.
“The wife of our tenant, Mr. Markel,” she said. “She delivered a boy a week past. I brought her a basket of food and warm smocks for her babe.”
Which was the truth. Only she had visited the day before.
The whiskey bottle clanked on his glass as he poured a liberal drink. “Not seeing that St. Clair boy, are you?”
“No, sir.”
“Shelley says he saw you walking in the wood.”
“Yes, sir. There is a path through the wood leading to the Markels.”
She hadn’t even thought of an alibi, and yet she had chosen one that fit perfectly with her clandestine meeting. What did it say about her that she could lie so well?
“Humph.” He stretched out his long, sinewy legs, his right big toe sticking out from a hole in his hose. This was one of those times when Kitty hid her distaste and wondered how she was related to him.
“You’ll ready the house for the Glorious Resurrection of Christ,” he said. “Guests will arrive this week.”
“Yes, sir. I will work with Mrs. Woodberry to ensure our home is welcoming. May I ask who will be joining us for Easter?”
“Father Dunlevy,” he said to Kitty’s delight. “The Stocktons, Delaneys, and Lord Staverton and his mother.”
How old was Staverton’s mother? Kitty imagined an imperious corpse croaking in an incomprehensible Northern accent.
Her lips were stiff, but she formed the proper response. “How very wonderful it will be to see all of them again. Is there anything more I may do for you, sir?”
He turned from her and started cleaning his long gun. “Stay home.”
“Sir?”
“You heard me. No running off to visit tenants or the St. Clairs.”
Easter was thirteen days away. Thirteen unlucky days without seeing Julian again when she had just reunited with him?
“Sir,” she said, her chin quivering, “it is our tradition to deliver packages to our tenants—”
“We don’t have the money for any packages.”
“How will we feed our guests?” she asked, her tone a little too hard.
He oiled a cloth and with the aid of a metal rod, stuffed it down the gun barrel. “I sold the pianoforte.”
Kitty clenched her hands behind her back. They itched to smash his glass over his lank-haired head. “You sold mother’s pianoforte?”
He looked up from the gun. “Are you questioning me?”
Kitty knew well the tight, simmering expression on his long face. She wasn’t so far gone to risk a beating. “No sir. I only asked because… I was curious as to its value.”
“Humph.” Sir Jeffrey returned his attention to the gun. She stood still, her eyes hot.
Despot, she wished to scream. Despot!
“A pretty penny it brings,” he finally said.
“Enough for the holy days and a new gun and hunter. Ensure it’s polished up.
I’ll ask for more when they come next week.
And heed me well. No venturing from the house.
Staverton’s to press his suit and you’ll be receptive. I expect an announcement on Easter.”
Gorge rose in her throat. “But he remarried.”
“She’s dead.”
“Oh,” she breathed. “How awful.” How awful for me. “I will be certain to offer my condolences anon.”
“You’re dismissed, Katherine.”
Turning slowly, she gritted back her tears in the event any of the few servants left saw her cry. She passed unseeing through the parlor and hall, the drawing room where a maid scurried from a worn settle where she had been dawdling.
Someone had placed a dead pheasant on her mother’s pianoforte.
She threw it to the carpet. Once the pianoforte was gone, so would be the carpet.
She sat on the stool upholstered with her mother’s embroidery.
So many of her favorite memories were of her mother here.
Her tapered fingers floating over the keys and smiling in utter joy.
Teaching Kitty to play. So patient. So young, really. So full of life. So…
“Oh, Mother.” She draped herself over the mahogany cover and sobbed.
Every instrument was an individual with its own unique sound.
Like a voice. And this pianoforte her father had sold for Easter, a gun, and a hunter, was her mother’s voice.
Each key conjured beautiful memories of her curling black hair and grey eyes and sultry voice.
The laughter she secreted from her husband and gave to Kitty.
Kitty cracked open the cover and slammed her hands to the keys.
That was the sound of her mother’s misery.
The beatings. The color of her bruises and cacophony of her cries.
Father Dunlevy had prayed with her, tried to soothe her mother’s weary soul, but to no avail.
Had her mother committed the ultimate sin against God? No, it was just a terrible accident.
Seizing the stool with both hands, Kitty fled the music room and wound through the drafty, dusty chambers and dark passageways to the nursery over the chapel.
She had never left the room with the cradle, crib, and narrow bed fit for a child.
Most of the furnishings in the numerous chambers had been sold long ago, and those left untouched were for guests.
But the nursery was far from her father and brother’s chambers.
She could cry without detection. And she did, after locking the door, with her cheek laid against the stool cushion.
Would Julian believe she had forsaken him again when she did not arrive at the river tomorrow? Would he chastise himself for his forward behavior as she had months ago when he had kissed her at the graveside in the summer moonlight?
She wrote to Julian, and at dinner with Clara in the sitting room off the nursery, she worried for taking Clara into her confidence. Desperation made her decision.
When was it ever warm in March? Sweltering in his knitted waistcoat, Julian yanked it and his shirt over his head as he ran. Bare chested as he double backed toward the finish, he glanced at a sheet of clouds bearing down from the west.
He fought to relax his breathing and loosen his shoulders as his feet pounded in the soft going.
His time was off, his mind unfocused. Actually, focused on a pair of lustful hazel eyes, a pink mouth, and soft hips bucking against him.
When he had set Kitty off, her eyes had been round, stunned.
If she spent any time considering what he had done and his erection that had been very obvious, she might never see him again.
He leapt for the rope hanging from the copper beech and missed it entirely, grabbing air and landing with a thud. Mud plastered to his hair, he scrambled up, hauled hand over hand to the top of the rope and leapt straight down to a crouched stance to gain time.
“Twenty-four minutes and forty seconds!” Nate announced as Julian passed.
Worse than he predicted.
Julian circled the house and entered the front door. Climbing the stairs, he kept a brisk pace, and when the thought seized him—the coming routine of therapies, bath and shave, choosing a lucky suit, waiting for Kitty, leaving alone—he halted and planted his hands at his thighs.
Can’t do it, can you boy? he heard his father say.
And Kitty: Don’t you dare care. Not now, not when you haven’t cared for 484 days.
Two hours later, Julian ripped the oars through the water in a cold rain.
The Fairy heaved into the reeds, and Willy landed beside him for his treat.
At the flash of red in the leafing woods, he stowed the oars and dragged the skiff farther ashore.
Hope knocked at his chest, but he walked toward Kitty with casual strides regardless of the rain.
He had almost rutted on his childhood friend.
No doubt he had made himself a fool by admitting he adored her.
Kitty stepped close, her voluminous hood hiding all but her chin and pressed a letter at his hand.
Oh God, no. She was ending it. He had prepared a speech just for this scenario. Julian peered into the hood, ready to make more a fool of himself. Clara, Kitty’s governess, stared at him over her thin, curved nose.
“I was asked to deliver this to you,” she said.
Hope drained from him. Kitty couldn’t even refute him in person.
He stowed the letter in his coat and watched Clara leave. Rain splattered his face and formed puddles. Which he freely marched into. He found satisfaction in wrecking his boots. Cleaning them would occupy him for an hour at least. When he returned home, alone.
Georgiana, in a cap and banyan, stepped from the library as he entered Farendon’s reception hall. “Good day, old man. Back so soon from your vigil? What did you do?”
Julian kept walking and Georgiana followed on his heels. “Nothing.”
“But you must have—”
Julian turned. “Georgie, if you mock me, I might strike a female for the first time in my life.”
Small miracles, his cousin apologized. “If you would like to talk someone…”
“I don’t.”
In his room, he removed his wet clothing, dried himself, and mindless to the chill, sprawled in his drawers and opened Kitty’s letter.
Dearest Julian,
Lord Staverton is coming to Notfelle for Easter as his wife of less than a year has died and he is in search of a third.
Sir Jeffrey has ordered me to be receptive.
He has also sold my mother’s pianoforte for a hunter and a gun and so Lord Staverton may eat us out of house and home while he presses his suit upon me.
Jesus would not approve. He could not. He could not.
I am to remain homebound through Easter. I fear Sir Jeffrey may never allow me to leave again. An absurd fear, you might judge, but one must never assume situations cannot worsen. Indeed, I feel my life so far has proven thus.
I am a wretched girl for having refused to see you for so long. I am sorry. Please forgive me, but I have no witty subscription.
Kitty