Chapter Seven #2
“What difference will one more child make to the minders, after all?” Stephanie said cheerfully as she drove the gig. “And I daresay I will be one of the minders.”
Winifred was touched by the warm welcome with which she was greeted at Cartref and enchanted by the lilting Welsh accents of Sir Ifor and his wife and Idris Rhys and his wife.
She really had not known what to expect from the stay at Ravenswood.
But it seemed they really were to be treated as honored guests, just as General Haviland and his family were.
Lady Rhys pressed coffee and cake upon her and Stephanie even though they had come directly from the breakfast table. And they urged Winifred to come back when that young scamp Owen had not decided to lay claim to her time.
“Oh, we have stories we could tell you about that lad that would raise the hairs on the back of your neck, Miss Cunningham,” Sir Ifor said. “Stephanie will bear us out.”
“He is hardly a lad any longer, Dad,” Idris said. “He is close to thirty.”
“You are showing your age, Ifor,” his wife said. “He is a very responsible young man now, I have heard.”
Sir Ifor laughed.
But the little girl made sure they did not settle in for a longer visit. She jumped up and down in front of Lady Stephanie’s chair.
“Can we go now, Aunty Steph?” she begged.
Meanwhile, her baby brother was lying in his mother’s arms, his plump cheeks still rosy from a recent sleep, and chuckling helplessly as she pretended to eat the fist he held up to her mouth.
“Give Aunty Steph and Miss Cunningham a moment to sit and finish their cake, Sian,” Eluned Rhys said. “Go and kiss Dad and Grandma and Grandpa before you go.”
“Sir Ifor is the most glorious organist,” Stephanie told Winifred on the way back to Ravenswood while the little girl bounced with excess energy on the seat between them in the gig.
“You will hear him at church on Sunday. And he conducts all the choirs—boys, girls, mixed, and adult. I swear he could make stones sing. He occasionally takes us to competitions in Wales, and almost always we win. He looks so disappointed if we do not that we promise faithfully to practice our heads off so it will not happen again.”
They both laughed. But really, Winifred thought, how lovely it would be to have such neighbors. And to have a friend like Stephanie, who seemed good-natured and genuinely pleased with her company.
…that young scamp. She smiled inwardly. Yes, she could imagine it.
—
Nicholas did not go to Cartref with the Havilands.
He had been planning to accompany Gwyneth as she showed them about the house this morning.
He had hoped he could steer Grace away from the group at some point for more private conversation.
Perhaps he would take her out to the courtyard and sit in the rose garden with her.
She would surely like that. It had occurred to him that she was perhaps uncertain of him, not sure that he really wanted to marry her.
Perhaps her reserve, the fact that her smiles for him were no warmer than were those she bestowed upon everyone else, reflected her uncertainty. He wanted to change that.
She had preferred, however, to accompany her parents and Gwyneth to Cartref this morning.
It was the polite thing to do, she had explained to him, rather pointedly, he had thought, in the hearing of Winifred Cunningham, who had made the opposite decision.
But Miss Cunningham was more spontaneous than Grace, more likely to do what she wished to do rather than what others might think she ought to do.
Directly after waving the carriage on its way to Cartref, Mr. Cunningham, sketchbook in hand, set out for the cottage by the river for his first preportrait interview with Mama.
He wanted to see her in the setting of her home, he had explained, where she was doubtless most comfortable.
He was right about that. Mama spent most of her time there with her husband when he was not working at his carpentry business.
They often wandered outside, hand in hand, among the flower beds they had planted with such care after the house was finished.
Sometimes they sat in the small rose arbor on the east side of the cottage with books they rarely opened because there was too much distraction in the river and all the scenery, both natural and cultivated, around them. And in each other.
Nicholas hoped Cunningham would be able to capture his mother’s deep contentment with her life.
It was more obvious to him, he supposed, than it would be to anyone who had not known her as she used to be.
It had never occurred to Nicholas, or to any of his brothers and sisters, he would guess, that she might be unhappy while they were growing up.
She had always been perfectly poised and elegant.
She had always given freely of her time to friends and neighbors—and to her own family.
She had organized dinners and musical picnics by the lake and parties and—most taxing of all—the annual summer fete.
After what Nicholas always thought of as the great catastrophe of his father’s infidelities being found out in the worst possible way at a village fete, his children had lost faith in a father they had admired and adored.
Their mother had lost far more, however, though her marriage limped on for several years before their father’s sudden death of a heart seizure one night while he was in the taproom at the inn.
Now she was both happy and contented. There was no mistaking the changes her second marriage had wrought in her life.
Nicholas hoped Cunningham would somehow see that, though he doubted she would tell him about the ordeal of her first marriage.
For while she had shielded them from knowledge of their father’s infidelities during the spring months he spent in London without them, she must have known.
She had chosen, as so many ladies in her situation did, to keep a dignified silence on the matter.
Nicholas found himself unexpectedly at loose ends this morning.
Stephanie had undertaken the task of helping the nurse entertain all the children, including Sian Rhys.
Perhaps he should help? However, when he peeped in at the nursery, he saw that Devlin was there too.
He raised a hand in greeting and closed the door on the chaos of what seemed to be preparations to go outside.
They would manage without him, though it was not going to be an easy task.
The Cunninghams were a rambunctious lot and varied widely in age and temperament.
His own nephew and nieces were high-spirited.
Owen was giving Winifred Cunningham a private tour of the house, something upon which Nicholas would not dream of intruding—as he would not have appreciated being intruded upon if Grace had remained here.
However, he soon discovered that young Sarah and Andrew Cunningham had felt no such compunction to be tactful and allow romance to take its course—if it was indeed a romance between those two.
Sarah no doubt felt she was too old to be lumped in with the children.
Andrew was probably bewildered by his silent, unfamiliar surroundings and considered his eldest sister the safest harbor in the absence of both his parents.
If Owen was disappointed, he was too good-natured to show it.
“Come along, then,” he was saying cheerfully to his group as Nicholas came down to the hall, having decided to go for a ride. “The more the merrier.”
And if Miss Cunningham was disappointed, she did not show it either.
She made no attempt to dismiss her siblings.
Nevertheless, it would be a kindness to join them too, Nicholas decided.
At least he could keep the younger two distracted while the prospective lovers had some chance to be just with each other.
How did one distract a boy who could neither hear nor speak, though?
How did one entertain him? He did it largely by chance when he beckoned the boy over to the French windows on the west side of the ballroom, where they began the tour.
The boy’s sisters had been exclaiming in awe over the size and splendor of the room, and now young Sarah was twirling in the center of the floor, her arms out to the sides while Winifred laughed and clapped her hands and Owen gazed indulgently at them both.
Nicholas pointed to the hill a short distance from the house and the temple folly perched on top, from which there was a panoramic view over the park and river and the village and countryside beyond.
He slid open one of the doors and filled his lungs with fresh air.
Devlin and Steph and the nurse had taken the children out there.
Some of them roared around, intent upon a game difficult to identify, while others climbed the grassy slope on the south side of the hill—there were trees down the north side—and swung around the pillars of the temple.
Two of them were running back down, shrieking as they tried to keep their feet beneath them.
A few of the smaller children tried rolling down, screeching with fright.
But Dev and Steph caught them before they came to grief, and the nurse gathered them about her to pet them and brush grass from their clothes and examine various bumps and bruises.
There was no sign of blood, as far as Nicholas could see.
The twins clung to the nurse’s skirts, one on each side of her, until they gathered the courage to run up the hill again, hand in hand.
Andrew gazed out at all the activity and at the rolling parkland beyond it and the lake in the distance. He waved a hand when Robbie waved to him and then beckoned him. He looked inquiringly at Nicholas.
“Go,” Nicholas said, indicating with a shooing gesture of his hands that Andrew had his permission to join his family if he wished.
The boy dashed outside and across the grass to his brother. He caught up Robbie’s dog in a tight hug, and Nelson panted and licked his face.
“I share Nelson with Andrew,” Robbie said when Nicholas strolled out after him. He looked wary and hostile, as though he thought Nicholas was planning to haul his brother back inside. “I look after him. He does not need you.”
“I am happy to hear that,” Nicholas said, ignoring the boy’s rudeness.
He squeezed young Andrew’s shoulder and indicated, when the boy looked up, that he intended to go back into the ballroom.
“Do you prefer to stay here?” He accompanied the words with raised eyebrows and a pointed finger that indicated the ground upon which they stood.
“He wants to stay,” Robbie said. “With me. And Nelson. You can go.”
Nicholas could see that he was still a difficult boy, always on the defensive, always expecting the worst of strangers.
What had happened in his long-ago past to give him that general attitude of hostility?
Or perhaps nothing had happened. Perhaps the boy had been born that way, just as some people—Sarah, for example—had been born with a sunny nature.
“I’ll do that,” Nicholas said, smiling at Stephanie and raising a hand to Devlin, who had Awen perched on his shoulder and Sian beside him, talking.
The tour continued with the family portrait gallery on the floor above the ballroom. It often served during the winter or inclement weather as a playground for the children, Owen explained, and as a place for adults to stroll.
He moved slowly along the room, describing each portrait, when it had been painted, whom it depicted, any special story attached to it.
He was doing it for Winifred’s sake, Nicholas saw.
He had her attention riveted, and she examined each portrait closely and asked intelligent questions.
She exclaimed with delight over some family resemblances she detected in long-ago ancestors.
Meanwhile, Sarah was becoming restless. Nicholas took her to look out the window at the southern end of the gallery. It was one way of amusing her and giving his brother a little more privacy. Sarah gazed out at the view.
“We have a lovely view from our home,” she said. “How fortunate we are to live in the hills with all of Bath spread below us.”
“There is a glass viewing room right above here,” he told her. “It has prospects in all directions.”
“Oh,” she said. “The onion room?”
He chuckled. “Some people call it a glass tear,” he said.
“Though it is not the sort of room much associated with sadness. We used to go up there particularly often during wet or cold weather. It is always warm there. And cozy. Children love it most for the dozens of cushions they can use for napping or pillow fights. Do you want to go there?”
“I am not a child,” she said, on her dignity.
“I spoke of children of all ages,” he said. “No, you are not. You are very nearly grown up.” She was at that betwixt and between age, when a growing child was never taken seriously as the adult she felt herself to be. He could remember the frustration.
She sighed. “I do envy Winnie,” she said.
“She is twenty-one. An undisputed grown-up. She even has a beau.” She flushed suddenly and bit her bottom lip, perhaps realizing to whom she spoke.
“At least, I think Mr. Owen Ware may be her beau. Though she has never said that. She believes she is far too plain to attract any suitor.”
“You would like to see the onion room?” he asked.
“Oh yes, please,” she said eagerly, and he called to Owen to let him know where they would be.