Chapter Twenty-One #2
Still, it comforted Frances to hear Mrs. Terry’s opinion, even if she could not believe it herself, and she wished the rector’s wife would say more.
Denver chose that moment to return, however, and then they must change the subject and discuss his reading.
Then the old schoolroom must be prepared with chairs and a carpet laid to serve as the stage and refreshments discussed with Mrs. Terry and the cook Winching.
It was not until Frances emerged from the rectory that she had time to nurse her anger again, but to her dismay she found it had relapsed into sadness.
This would never do! She could not possibly go home until she regained her composure.
Therefore she took an equally dilatory route, this time creeping down to walk beside the Thames, threading her way through the willows and ash trees to avoid muddy spots, fingers rubbing at the marsh grasses which rustled against her skirts.
She heard the voices before she saw their owners.
“Don’t be alarmed. I have no designs on your fishing spot, Jimmy.”
“But you’re—you’re—Mrs. Lamb sent the wagon to carry you back to Oxford!”
“So she did. But Oxford isn’t far distant, you know. I walked back. To think, you see. To meditate. Do you do a lot of thinking here, Jimmy? Fishing for chub seems ideally suited for it.”
Carefully, pressing her skirts tight to her legs so they would not brush against the reeds, Frances retreated, her heart thumping so loudly she was certain either Mr. Hearne or Jimmy would say, “Do you hear that? Like someone beating a bass drum.”
Whatever was he doing there? If he had walked back from Christ Church, did that mean it was something he might do again in the future? Had he developed an affection for Iffley, if not for its inhabitants, which would continue to draw him?
She had supposed him altogether banished from her life, and she did not know how to feel if he was not.
Not that he was returning, per se. Jimmy had seen him by chance, because Mr. Hearne had chosen to haunt Jimmy’s fishing hole. It was not as if he had come to call at Iffley Cottage. Only one thing was certain: she would avoid Jimmy’s fishing hole henceforth this summer.
One more thing soon became equally certain, unfortunately, though Frances could not bear to admit it to herself. And that was that she spent the remainder of the afternoon in the parlor, one ear cocked for Mr. Hearne’s step coming up the walk. A step which never came.
The late afternoon was still sunny and warm when the Barstows walked to the rectory, it having been decided that they would read through the scene once with George before the audience arrived.
“At least he has seen it performed a dozen times in rehearsals and again last night,” Maria said. “Frances, you might ask him to do his best imitation of Mr. Hearne playing Bottom. Otherwise it will be so dull to have him standing there, reading from the playbook, and no one will laugh at all.”
“He is doing us a favor, Maria,” Frances reminded her. “I don’t want to weigh him down with instructions at the last minute. You must resign yourself.”
“There’s Peter,” Gordon exclaimed, waving. “I was afraid Mrs. Dere would nix him coming as well, and then we would have needed yet another substitute, in which case we might as well abandon Shakespeare and just read from Abernethy’s Sermons, it would be so flat.”
Peter Dere came along at a gallop, and neither Frances nor Sarah bothered remonstrating when the boys raced together into the churchyard, whooping and vaulting over some of the tilting gravestones sunken in the grass.
Their play was cut short, however, and their crowing replaced by yelps of alarm when they spied a figure moving among the draggling branches of the encroaching trees.
“A ghost!” shrieked Maria, clutching Frances’ arm.
“Nonsense,” Frances returned. Even though she had gasped with the rest of them, some part of her brain simultaneously recognized that particular gait, leaving her paralyzed for a completely different reason. “It’s not a ghost. It’s—it’s—”
“It’s Adam Hearne,” supplied Adam Hearne, emerging into the light. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to frighten anyone, but I thought I would be safe donning my costume in there.” Spreading his arms, he indicated Bottom’s coarse mechanical’s shirt and trousers.
They were nonplussed.
He was indeed Adam Hearne, and yet he was not at all the one they had known.
Or thought they had known. His beauty was unchanged, to be sure, but the difference lay all in his eyes.
Gone was the blank blinking, the cheerful vacancy.
This Adam Hearne wore a keen, alert expression which only Frances had ever glimpsed before.
This one was the wolf.
“But—whatever are you doing here?” asked Frances.
He licked his lips. “It’s Pyramus and Thisbe. That is, today is the performance of it.”
“I know that. But you—all of you—last night—” she floundered.
“We heard you and Mr. Midgecomb and Mr. Tilson had gone,” Sarah rescued her. It was kinder than saying everyone knew they’d effectively been expelled from Greenwood Hall.
“We did go this morning, but I have returned for this engagement.” His eyes met Frances’, and there was a gleam in them which might have been defiance or just humor. She couldn’t say, of course, not knowing this version of Adam Hearne from Adam.
“I said I was steadfast,” he murmured.
“You said any number of things,” rejoined Frances shortly, regaining her composure.
“Shall we go in? I will have to tell George he is excused from reading Bottom.” But even as she said it, she wondered if she was doing the right thing.
Because if the Eveleighs had ordered the guests to decamp so hastily, did that not mean they thought them no longer deserving of welcome in Iffley?
What would they think, when they learned she had allowed Mr. Hearne to participate in the scene, as if nothing had passed?
And with Mrs. Lamb in the audience, they would learn it the moment the metaphorical curtain fell!
“Wait,” she said, stopping short of the rectory step. “Mr. Hearne, if I might have a word with you first? The rest of you go along. It will only be a minute.”
“But what do we tell George?” Gordon asked. “Is he to be Bottom or not?”
She evaded the question. “It will do him no harm to continue practicing. Go on, please.”
“If the church is open, we might sit in there,” he suggested when they were alone.
“No, thank you.” Only imagine what Mrs. Dere would have to say, if Frances disappeared from view!
As it was, she had no doubt more than one person was peeking out the rectory windows at them now.
Never mind that she had spoken alone with Mr. Hearne a dozen times before, at the Hall and at home.
He had been the harmless Mr. Hearne then.
She led the way a little distance from the rectory door, in any case, and perched atop one of the leaning gravestones. Then an awkward pause followed, she wondering how to begin and he no better collected.
“Have…Mrs. Hearne and Mr. Reginald Hearne returned with you to Oxford?” Frances ventured.
“No, they have gone back to Weymouth,” he replied, “where I will join them after this.”
Another pause. Apparently he was not going to say any more about them. With her fingernail, Frances dug into the moss covering the stone.
“Mr. Hearne,” she tried again. “Leaving your…steadfastness…aside, I wonder if it would not have been better to stay away.”
“I do not doubt it,” he said in a low voice. “But I—could not bear to have—such a pleasant holiday end in the way it did.”
“Sadly, it is precisely because of how it ended that we, at least, will not remember the time as pleasant.” She sounded stiff.
Pompous. Perhaps he would return to Christ Church and regale Mr. Midgecomb and Mr. Tilson with this further proof of how they had wounded the village’s silly pride, and the three men would have another laugh.
This picture made her add, “Private jokes are seldom amusing to those outside the group.”
“We were not enjoying a private joke.”
But Frances had a sudden memory of the first time she encountered Mr. Hearne and Mr. Tilson, before she knew who they were. She remembered how Mr. Hearne gawped at a butterfly, while Mr. Tilson’s shoulders shook with smothered merriment. What was this, if not a private joke?
“Why did you not present yourself as you truly are, then?” she insisted, vexed to hear the tremble in her voice. “Why come here, pretending to be…someone you were not?”
He regarded the grass at his feet, his mouth twisting.
For a minute Frances thought he was not going to enlighten her on this topic either, and, as the seconds dragged, she had half a notion to flounce away in disgust, but then he said at last, “I am not at liberty to say why, but I assure you—I swear—none of it was done in malice or disrespect.”
Her eyes widening, a scoff escaped her. “How can it not be disrespectful to deceive others, whether it is done in malice or not?”
He held up his palms, his grimace deepening. “I can only say that I was as sincere as I could be, within the limits which had been set.”
And what did that mean? she thought angrily. What on earth did that mean? Was he implying that he had been sincere when he offered for her? When he told her he liked her mind and her looks and her family?
Whatever the man meant, it was not something she could ask questions about.
She could hardly demand that he assign percentages of sincerity to the things he had said to her, and how mortifying it would be to have him make more faces at her while admitting, “Oh—not that particular bit. I didn’t mean that part. ”
“I suppose I came back, Miss Barstow, in order to ask your pardon. In the hope you might be persuaded to forgive…our little ruse. In time.” He ground the heel of his boot into a clump of sod.
“That’s all. And to do the scene. Because I said I would.
Do you suppose you might, Miss Barstow? Come to forgive me, I mean. ”
This time it was she who held up helpless palms. “But how can I, Mr. Hearne? When I do not even know what, precisely, I am forgiving, or whom?” Springing to her feet, she muttered, “I had better go in.”
“And I?” he asked.
“You must do as you think best.”