Chapter One
1818
Clarissa Ware, Dowager Countess of Stratton, drew in a deep breath of fresh air as she stood looking out through the open window of her private sitting room. It was sheer bliss. She could smell the freshly scythed lawn below that stretched ahead as far as the ha-ha. She could smell the sweetness of the wildflowers in the meadow beyond it and see the sheep grazing there. Sunlight sparkled on the river below the meadow and shone bright upon the village of Boscombe on the other side. Was there any lovelier place on this earth to be?
Ravenswood.
Home!
It was so different from all the bustle and stale air and limited horizons of London, where she had spent the past few months, rushed off her feet as she presented Stephanie, her youngest daughter, to the queen, and introduced her to the ton . That latter duty had meant attending as many balls and routs and garden parties and soirees and other entertainments as could reasonably be fitted into the twenty-four hours each day allowed. The spring Season had an overabundance of pleasures to offer as one mingled with as many of one’s peers as one could. There had been scarcely a morning in which to linger in bed, or an afternoon in which to relax with a book or her embroidery. There had been almost no evenings to spend at home in the familiar company of her family. Even the nights had frequently been shortened by a particularly glittering ball.
At last she was home, however, and, for the first time she could remember, she was home alone. Alone except, that was, for the army of servants who kept the vast mansion running smoothly and administered the farms and kept the park surrounding the house in pristine condition. She was alone, however, in the sense that there were no other family members here with her and no guests. And it was going to remain this way for at least the next couple of months.
She felt slightly guilty at the delight she felt at the prospect of being alone for so long, for she dearly loved her family and close friends. Sometimes, however, she yearned for solitude, for time to be alone with her own thoughts and reflections. Now, after the insanely busy months in London, she craved it more than ever.
And there was the added fact that in a few short months she was going to turn fifty. It was all very well to tell herself, as other people had been telling her with annoying frequency lately, that fifty was just a number, that she was only as old as she felt, that she would be the same person the day after her birthday as she had been the day before.
Fifty was a number of undeniable significance. It was a reminder that her youth had been left behind so long ago that sometimes it felt like something from another lifetime or something that had happened to someone else. Her young womanhood was long gone too. Her children were all grown. Stephanie, her baby, was nineteen years old. Clarissa had already been married for two years when she was Steph’s present age. Devlin had been born when she was eighteen.
Caleb had died of a sudden heart seizure six years ago.
Oh, fifty seemed so much larger a number than forty. Or even forty-nine. There was something very decisive about it. Half a century.
One of the sheep in the meadow baaed indignantly at a bird that had swooped too low over its head. The bird perched on the edge of the ha-ha close by and serenaded the sheep with cheeky indifference to any danger posed by the much larger animal. Clarissa smiled as she watched.
It was not that she was feeling particularly maudlin about her advancing age. There had been considerable happiness in her life up to this point, and there was every chance that there was more to come. As far as she knew, she was in excellent health. Her children were all doing well. Her grandchildren were an endless delight to her—four of them so far, with two more on the way. Pippa and Lucas were expecting again sometime after Christmas, as were Ben and Jennifer, though it was the first for them as a couple. Five-year-old Joy was Ben’s daughter from a previous marriage. Clarissa’s parents were both still in good health. George, her brother, was happily married to her longtime friend Kitty, both of them after a lengthy widowhood.
There was much cause for contentment, then, in Clarissa’s life. It was true that Stephanie had not enjoyed her debut Season, but at least she was now officially out, and her confidence had surely been boosted by the two perfectly eligible offers for her hand that had been made very properly first to Devlin, Clarissa’s eldest son, now Earl of Stratton. Steph had refused both offers, but Clarissa had hopes that one of these days her daughter would surprise herself and actually welcome just the right marriage. It was not a good idea, after all, for a woman to remain a spinster all her life, though Devlin and Gwyneth would always welcome Steph to continued residence here at Ravenswood, as they had assured her after she refused the second offer. And the choice between marriage and the single state was Stephanie’s to make.
It had not helped this year, of course, that Owen, Clarissa’s second youngest, had also been in town for the Season, enjoying himself with a group of friends, most of them from his Oxford days. One of those friends was Bertrand Lamarr, Viscount Watley, who had spent a few weeks at Ravenswood with Owen a couple of summers ago. He had been a delightful young man then and still was now. He was in town with his twin sister, Lady Estelle Lamarr, this year and had been delighted to introduce her to the Ware family, whom he remembered with great fondness. He was the sort of young man girls dreamed of—tall, dark, handsome, and genuinely charming. Lady Estelle was outstandingly lovely too. Poor Stephanie had lived through agonies during those weeks here two years ago. She had been seventeen and self-conscious and convinced she was the ugliest young woman in existence. She had gone to great lengths to avoid the young god with whom she had clearly been smitten.
Poor Steph.
Two years had not changed her. She had reacted exactly the same way to him this year, though it had been admittedly easier to avoid Viscount Watley among the crowds in London than it had been in the family setting at Ravenswood.
Almost the whole of Clarissa’s family had been in London this year, though Ben had remained home at Penallen with Jennifer and Joy, and Nicholas, now a full colonel with his cavalry regiment, was still somewhere in Europe, though he expected to return soon to England, where he would take up a military post at the Horse Guards in Whitehall.
In many ways it had been a wonderful few months for Clarissa, surrounded by family and friends, always busy, always with interesting new acquaintances to make—and even a beau of her own, who had actually hinted at marriage. She had been tempted. But when Lucas, Duke of Wilby, had announced that he was taking Pippa and the children back home to Greystone for the sake of his wife’s health, and Stephanie had jumped at the opportunity to go with them to see her sister through her confinement, Clarissa had declined the invitation to go with them then or to join them later, after the Season was over. Instead, she had announced her intention of returning home to Ravenswood.
There had been a chorus of protests, for no one else had intended to come back here yet. Devlin and Gwyneth were planning to go straight to Wales with their children after the parliamentary session and the Season ended to visit Gwyneth’s Welsh relatives. They had wanted Clarissa to go with them. Her relatives would be more than delighted, Gwyneth had assured her. She had pointed out that Sir Ifor and Lady Rhys, her parents and Clarissa’s closest neighbors and friends, would be going there too for a month or so. George and Kitty had begged Clarissa to remain a little longer in London and then return home with them for the summer. Owen had offered nobly to escort his mother home to Ravenswood and spend the summer there, though there was nothing in particular to attract him. There was to be no grand summer fete this year, the organizing committee having decided that there was just too much work involved to make it an annual event.
Clarissa had smiled at the reason they had given for the decision. While Caleb was alive, he had always insisted upon the summer fete as an annual event, proclaiming that all the effort involved was in itself such a delight that it hardly qualified as work. But there had been no committee in those days. It was Clarissa who had done the huge amount of planning and organizing, with help from the servants and from her children as they grew older. Caleb had simply paid the bills.
She had refused Owen’s offer, and he had gamely tried to hide his relief.
She had come home alone yesterday—apart from an entourage of servants and outriders, of course. It had felt and still felt like a very special treat, though it was more than just that. She needed to adjust to the fact that she was about to turn fifty, that she was moving into a new phase of her life—had already moved, in fact, for she had been a widow for six years.
It was not easy when one had been a wife for twenty-seven years. It took far longer to adjust than anyone who had not experienced the death of a spouse could possibly understand, even when the marriage had not been entirely an easy one. Was there such a thing as an easy marriage, though? But she was going to be fifty soon, and it was time she embraced her freedom.
Whatever that was going to look like.
She was not lonely. There was a difference between loneliness and aloneness. She was about to discover what aloneness felt like. Not total solitude, however. She was not going to be a hermit for the next couple of months until Devlin and Gwyneth returned from Wales. She had friends and acquaintances here to visit and be visited by. There would be certain obligations she had no intention of neglecting. But she would keep it all to a minimum and make sure she spent most of the time alone with herself. It would be something quite new.
There was one other thing she wanted to do, however, and perhaps today would be the very day to do it—before she lost her courage, as she had done a number of times over the past few years. She just had not known what she would say to him. But now she had the perfect excuse—no, reason—to call upon him. Ben and Jennifer were expecting a baby. She would go and talk to him about that, and slip in the other thing—if she could find the right moment and if her nerve held.
How very foolish she was being! She was not usually either timid or indecisive.
She turned from the window at last and cast a rueful eye at the clock on the mantel and then at the nightclothes she still wore. She had spoiled herself this morning and had breakfast brought up to her sitting room rather than sit in lone splendor in the breakfast parlor, waited upon by a silent, attentive butler and footman.
She crossed the room and pulled on the bell rope to summon her maid. It was time to get dressed and begin this precious interlude of aloneness, when she could be entirely her own person and do whatever she pleased—even have breakfast in her rooms every single morning if she chose.
What a luxurious adventure she was embarking upon.
—
Matthew Taylor had spent the morning at the home of Colonel Wexford just outside Boscombe. The colonel’s unmarried sister, who had lived with him for years, had decided that it was high time they replaced their old, battered dining table with a new one.
“Even though it is polished twice a week and covered permanently with a linen cloth and then a lace one, Mr. Taylor,” she said, speaking of the old table, “I am still fully aware of all the scratches and nicks and water stains upon it. I am always anxious when we have dinner guests lest for some reason the cloth has to be peeled off and our guests will see the sad state of a table that was probably as old as the hills even when Andrew first allowed it into his home.”
It had come with the colonel’s bride many long years ago. “It was her pride and joy and her mother’s before her,” the colonel explained to Matthew rather sheepishly. “No one else in the regiment had anything to compare with it in size and grandeur. Especially a humble lieutenant, which is what I was at the time.”
“I know it is of sentimental value to you, Andrew,” his sister said more gently. “But it is time for a new one, you must admit.”
“If I must, I must,” he said with a mournful sigh and a wink for Matthew. “Measure away, then, Taylor. Prue will tell you exactly what she wants, and you can draw up plans for her approval. What am I, after all, but the man who will pay your bill and eat at the new table?”
“Oh, take no notice of him, Mr. Taylor,” Miss Wexford said. “If Andrew had lived on Noah’s ark, he would probably still be there now, comfortable with its familiarity.”
Matthew had measured and taken notes of exactly what Miss Wexford envisioned, and promised to return the following day with drawings for her approval.
Matthew Taylor was the village carpenter. He had both his living quarters and his workshop in rented rooms above the smithy in Boscombe. Cameron Holland, the blacksmith, was his friend, as was Oscar Holland, who had announced his retirement several years ago and since then had made an appearance almost every day back at the smithy, interfering with its smooth running, if one listened to Cam—making sure that everything was kept in good working order, as it had always been in his day, if one listened to Oscar. Matthew chose not to listen too attentively to either one. Father and son bickered and outright argued at least once a day, but they were clearly fond of each other and both were excellent smiths and well-liked members of the community.
Matthew was not nearly as outgoing as they were, but he was not a hermit. He was friendly with almost everyone in the village and the countryside surrounding it. Most people did not seem to know—or they had forgotten—that he had been born and raised a gentleman, that his brother was a prosperous landowner a mere ten miles or so away, that he himself owned the property next to his brother’s, which his grandmother had left to him on her passing.
He had not settled there, however. He had chosen instead to lease it out and hire a good steward for the farm. He was known here simply as the village carpenter. The rooms in which he lived and plied his trade were modest, to say the least, not to mention the fact that they were above the smithy, with all the noise and smells that fact entailed.
He was content with his life. Perhaps even happy, though he thought of happiness as an active, sometimes volatile thing, and his feelings about his life were more muted. That suited him. There were too many ups and downs associated with happiness or active emotion. Contentment offered a more attractive alternative, though he was realistic enough to realize that events could not always be controlled and might at any moment upset the habit of years.
Miss Wexford had ideas for a very ornate dining table indeed. They were not to Matthew’s taste, but they were the customer’s choice and he would give what was asked of him, perhaps with an attempt to tone down some of the more extravagant excesses. He would do all in his power, though, to give her what could be her pride and joy, as the old table had been her sister-in-law’s.
He arrived home with his head full of the design he would commit to paper to show Miss Wexford tomorrow and noticed that one of the more modest carriages from Ravenswood was drawn up outside the village inn. Ah, the Wares were home from London, then, were they? He would have to be more careful about his jaunts to the poplar alley inside the park, though the whole of the park was open for the use and enjoyment of the public at large for three days out of every week. Indeed, Stratton—Devlin Ware, that was—had often been heard to say that he and his wife would be happy to see their neighbors strolling there or enjoying a picnic by the lake any day of the week. It seemed selfish, he had explained, to keep such spacious beauty all to themselves.
They were decent folk, the Wares, Matthew thought as he made his way up the outside stairs that led to his rooms above the smithy and heard the familiar ringing of a hammer on the anvil. They were not at all high in the instep. Years ago he had wished they were, so he would have some reason to hate them, but he had never been able to find any such excuse. Even if he had, it was a spiteful wish that was unworthy of him.
“Mr. Taylor,” a female voice called from the street below as he turned the knob on his door and was about to step inside. He had not locked it when he left. He never did. As far as he knew, no one did. Boscombe was a decent, safe place to live.
He would have known that voice anywhere, anytime. He turned to look down at the Dowager Countess of Stratton, his hand still on the doorknob.
“I was wondering,” she said, looking up at him, “if I might have a word with you.”
She was alone, he saw, though there was presumably a coachman inside the inn, keeping an eye on the carriage while he enjoyed his pint of ale and awaited the return of his mistress. There was no sign of a maid. It was not a shocking breach of decorum, of course, since Boscombe was in many ways just an extension of Ravenswood. But…Did she mean a private word? In his rooms?
“May I come up?” she asked, almost as though she had heard his thoughts.
“Please do,” he said, and stepped inside in order to hold the door open for her as she ascended the stairs, holding up the skirts of her dark blue carriage dress, which had surely been newly and expertly—and expensively—fashioned in London.
“Good morning, Lady Stratton,” he said briskly as she reached the top stair and raised her head to look at him again.
She smiled. “Good afternoon, Matthew,” she said.
“I suppose it is past noon,” he said, closing the door after she had stepped inside.
And suddenly the place felt not quite like his home. It seemed filled with her presence, and he felt half suffocated. It was a strange fact, when he had seen her with fair frequency for years past and had occasionally exchanged a few words with her. He had even danced with her once in the ballroom at Ravenswood. But she had never been here inside his home before. She was looking around with unabashed curiosity.
“What a cozy home you have,” she said, and it did not sound as if she was mocking him.
The room was not large, but it suited him. It was uncluttered—as was his life. There was a couch that would seat three at a push. It had seen better days, but it was marvelously comfortable. There was a rocking chair and a small table with two upright chairs, all of which he had made himself. There was a knotted cotton mat on the floor and, on the walls, a few pictures he had acquired on his travels. A bookcase he had also made stood beneath one of them, stuffed with his favorite books. There were wooden candlesticks, again his own handiwork, on a shelf above the stove, plus a couple of his wood carvings, though not his favorite one. That was in his bedchamber, a smaller room next door.
The smithy was large. The rooms above it, the original home of the Hollands, were of an equal size. Most of the space now, though, was given over to Matthew’s workroom. His living quarters were small, but he liked them that way. They served his needs.
“It is a little smaller than Ravenswood,” he said, and she smiled at him again.
“A trifle smaller,” she agreed. “It has a low ceiling. It must be warm in winter.”
“And stifling in the summer,” he said, “especially with Cam working below me. Ah, he has stopped hammering. That is better. Now we can hear ourselves think.”
He actually liked the sounds of the smithy and even the smells, though they had taken some getting used to at first. There was, of course, the additional smell of wood coming from his workroom.
“You have a pleasant view through the window,” she said, approaching it to look out over the village green to the river on the far side of it and the park of Ravenswood beyond that, though the house was out of sight from this particular window.
“Yes,” he said, and recalled his manners. “Will you have a seat?” He indicated the couch, but she pulled out a chair and sat at the table. “May I make you a cup of tea?”
“I will not trouble you, but thank you,” she said. “I came to find out if you are very busy at the moment.”
He was always busy, though he was careful never to allow work to dominate his waking hours or overwhelm him. He had learned to say no when he felt he had to. People came from near and far with commissions for him, both minor and major. He had wondered when he first set up here if he could possibly make a living from the proceeds of what he could make—or mend—with his own hands. He would not have been destitute if it had been impossible, of course, as there were the lease payments he received annually for the manor house that had been his grandmother’s and a considerable income from the farm. But he had vowed he would never use that money to live upon. He had decided long ago that he would make his own way in life, and stubbornness was one of his besetting sins, or one of his virtues, depending upon one’s point of view.
“Not too busy,” he said. He stood looking down at her, his hands clasped behind his back, and marveled at how well she had aged. She had been a very slender, vividly pretty dark-haired girl with a warm charm that seemed to be the very essence of her being. She no longer had the extreme slenderness of youth, but she was still slim and shapely in a more womanly way. She was no longer pretty. She was beautiful instead—and there was a difference, the first characterized by the sparkle of youth, the second by the calm dignity of maturity. Her hair was still dark, though if she removed her bonnet perhaps he would see some silver threaded through it. She was, after all, fifty years old or close to it. Her birthday was in the autumn.
She had been married to Stratton for well over twenty years before he collapsed and died in the taproom of the inn just down the road from here. They had had five children, all now grown up, two of them already married with children. She was a grandmother. And there was also Ben Ellis, the sixth child, who was not hers but a by-blow of the late Stratton’s with a mistress he had kept in London. Matthew had always marveled that she had agreed to take in the young child when his mother died and Stratton brought him to Ravenswood, a mere few weeks after Devlin was born. That had all happened before Matthew left England and stayed away for more than ten years.
She was a remarkable woman, Clarissa Ware, Dowager Countess of Stratton.
“Ben and Jennifer are expecting their first child just after Christmas,” she said, again as if reading his thoughts.
Ben had done well for himself despite his illegitimacy. Stratton must have left him money. He had apparently purchased his home down by the sea from Devlin. Last year he married Lady Jennifer Arden, sister of the Duke of Wilby, who was married to the former Lady Philippa Ware. Matthew had had dealings with Lady Jennifer while she was staying at Ravenswood two years ago.
“Ah,” he said. “I made her a wheeled chair and a stout cane the year before last, both with help from Cam Holland. I hope she is doing well. John Rogers made her shoes at the same time to help her walk.”
“She uses them all with skill and determination,” Clarissa said. “The chair has given her great freedom of movement, and she actually walks, twisted leg notwithstanding, far more than anyone could have predicted just a couple of years ago, thanks to the special boot and the cane.”
“I am delighted to hear it,” he said.
She bit her lip and proceeded to one of the main purposes of her visit. “Do you have time to make a crib for their new baby? A bed that is practical and cozy and safe but with your distinctive touch of artistry? I cannot even give you ideas on the latter. I do not have an artistic imagination, alas, though I can appreciate it when I see it. I would love to give them the crib as my gift.”
“It would be my pleasure,” he said. He would have to give priority to Miss Wexford’s dining table, of course, and that would be time-consuming, to say the least. But most of his other, smaller jobs were nearing completion, and the crib would not be needed much before Christmas, he supposed. Making it would be a personal indulgence, since it sounded as though he would be given free rein with its design. He already had images running through his head of plump, smiling elephants and pop-eyed giraffes, of grinning, curly-tailed monkeys and perky terriers.
“Thank you.” She was beaming up at him. “I thought of it when I was in London, and I could hardly wait to come home and ask you.”
“I will make some sketches for your approval,” he said. “Will sometime within the next week suit you?”
“Perfectly,” she said. “Shall I return a week from today?”
She had got to her feet, and he felt stifled again. Her face was eager, almost with the bright radiance of her youth.
“It would be better if I came to you,” he said. “This is rather a public part of the village.”
He worried that people might believe he was compromising her, though that was absurd. He was, after all, merely the village carpenter, while she was the Dowager Countess of Stratton of Ravenswood Hall.
“Very well, then,” she said. “If it is not too much of an inconvenience to you.”
He expected her to cross the room back to the door then to take her leave. But instead she went to stand in front of the stove to look at the candlesticks and the wood carvings on the shelf above it. She did not touch any of them.
“You did not enter anything for the wood-carving contest at the fete last year,” she said.
“No,” he said. “I won the year before and twice in a row before that.” There had been a gap of eight years when there had been no summer fete at all. “I thought it ought to be someone else’s turn.”
“That was thoughtful of you,” she said. She was still staring upward, though he had the feeling she was not really seeing the shelf. There was a tenseness about her stance. “What do you do with all your carvings?”
“Most of them are on shelves in my workroom,” he said. “A few have sold or been given as gifts.”
“And the one from two years ago?” she asked.
He winced inwardly. He should never have let anyone see that particular carving. He certainly ought not to have entered it in the contest at the village fete. That had been a rash indulgence, for it had aroused a great deal of attention and had won first prize. He had been sorry immediately after entering it, but by then it had been too late to enter something else instead.
“I believe it is in my bedchamber,” he said. It was the only one of his carvings that was there.
She turned to look at him, her cheeks slightly flushed, and they gazed at each other until he turned abruptly and went to fetch it—the wood carving of a woman standing against a tree gazing off into the distance, the carving that had seemed to create itself independent of his will, almost as if it were something that had come through him rather than from him and had simply made use of his hands and his eyes and his skills. All art was a bit like that, of course, but this, more than anything else he had created, had consumed his whole being until it was finished.
He set it down in the middle of the table, and she came to stand beside him and look at it for a few long, silent moments. And of course, he realized, this was why she had come here today, the baby’s crib merely an excuse. She might have summoned him to Ravenswood for that.
She sat on the chair she had recently vacated in order to view the carving at eye level.
“Is she me?” Her voice was a mere whisper of sound.
He considered his answer. A blurted No was not going to sound convincing.
“She is woman,” he said carefully at last. “Or, rather, she is humanity. All of us, gazing off into…what? The future? The past? The very present moment? All three at once? She is dreams and hope and nostalgia and endurance and yearning and…”
His voice trailed off. He felt the inadequacy of language, something that had always frustrated him until he had learned to let go and simply let some things be. It worked except when he was trying to explain his ideas to another person.
She was leaning back against the tree, her hands flat against the trunk on either side of her, as though she were drawing life and energy from it and feeling her unity with all of nature. An unseen breeze was fluttering her long, loose hair and the full skirt of her dress.
“She is me,” Clarissa whispered.
He opened his mouth to protest but then shook his head slightly and closed his mouth. What was the point of denying it?
“It was a pivotal moment, a turning point in both our lives,” she said. “The day we left our childhood and youth behind and became adults.”
“Yes,” he said.
“Most people could not possibly point to one specific day when that happened,” she said. “For most it must be a gradual process, not one giant shock.”
“You were happy,” he said.
“And also very, very sad,” she said.
He drew breath to ask if she had been happy after that day, if she felt she had done the right thing in marrying Stratton. But it was none of his business, and he did not particularly want to know that she had indeed been happy. He wanted even less to know that she had been unhappy.
“Life’s two extremes,” she said.
“Yes.”
She turned her head to look up at him. “Thank you,” she said.
For a moment he thought she was going to say more, but she did not. She smiled at him instead as she got to her feet and turned to the door.
“I will send word when I have sketches for the crib to bring for your approval,” he said.
“I shall look forward to seeing them,” she said, her hand on the doorknob.
Only after she had stepped outside and closed the door behind her did it occur to him that he ought to have opened the door for her. He listened to her footsteps as she went down the stairs to the pavement. Cam had still not returned to his anvil. He had probably gone home for his luncheon.