Chapter Twenty-Eight
Will was home by teatime the next day, full of his trip. It was the longest he had ever been away in his life and he now felt like a seasoned traveler.
“That there’s a fine old town,” he declared, unusually loquacious.
“There’s walls what the Romans built. Mr. Andrew showed me.
It used to be more important than Lunnon, seemingly.
We was too late for the post coach. It ’ad gone by the time we got there, so we set ourselves up at the Royal Oak.
Good dinner they give us — there were a fiddler, an’ all!
Then today, Mr. Andrew said not t’wait fer ’im.
He’d get on the coach when it come. So I set off ’ome. ”
“And we’re glad to have you back,” said Cynthia warmly. “We missed you, didn’t we, Ruby?”
“Don’t sound like ’e missed us, Miss Cynthia,” grumbled Ruby. “’Im and ’is good dinner and ’is fiddler! What they charge you, then? More than it was worth, I’ll be bound.”
“That I don’t rightly know, acoz Mr. Andrew paid the shot. An’ I dint say it were better than your dinner, you old besom. Give us a kiss.”
And to her immense surprise, Will grasped his wife around the waist and gave her a resounding kiss.
She was, of course, enormously gratified, but covered it up by saying gruffly, “Yer’d better stay at ’ome, yer old fool, if that’s the way travel is goin’ to take yer.
I don’t know what’s come over yer, that I don’t. ”
As he went off to hang up his cloak and cap, and change into his normal everyday wear, Will was whistling a tune the fiddler had played the night before.
For him, the trip to Winchester had been the experience of a lifetime.
By the time he was a very old man, the steam trains were making such travel easy for everyone, but he never went back.
His memory of that wonderful twenty-four hours sustained him for the rest of his life.
Cynthia decided to take advantage of Mr. Fielding’s absence to change the sheets on his bed and give the room a good clean.
Once he was fully recovered, he had insisted on doing it himself, but, like most good housekeepers, she didn’t really trust him to do it properly.
Teacup came in the minute she opened his door, and leaped onto the bed.
She sniffed around for a scent of her hero, and finally curled up on the pillow.
“You’re going to have to move,” said Cynthia. “I’m taking off the sheets.”
She pulled the bedlinen from under the cat, who gave an affronted yowl, leaped onto the floor and went under the bed.
“It’s no good going there, either,” said the inexorable cleaner, “I saved the tea leaves from breakfast, and once I’ve remade the bed, I’m going to scatter them under the bed to collect the dust, then sweep. Unless you want to end up in the dustpan, you’d better come out.”
Teacup made no response to this information, and only emerged, much affronted, with damp tea leaves on her nose, when her mistress completed this program.
Andrew had left his knapsack, together with the stool and the easel, leaning against the side of big old sofa, and the flap at the top wasn’t fastened.
Cynthia reached for it to put it up out of the way, so that she could sweep under it.
As she picked it up, the sketch book fell out, and loose pages fluttered onto the floor.
It was a new one he had ordered from London when he replenished his paints.
She was dumbfounded at what she saw. Picture after picture of her!
She sat on the sofa and looked at them. There she was, reading, sewing, looking up and smiling, tucking her errant curl into her cap, talking to Teacup.
There had to be twenty of them. She knew she wasn’t beautiful.
She’d never considered herself more than passable.
But these images showed a woman whose face glowed with a liveliness of expression that was more interesting than mere beauty.
She held the sheets of paper to her breast in wonder.
That was how he saw her! There was no doubt they had been drawn with affection, or even, dared she even think it, love.