Chapter Thirteen
For once in her life Clarissa was not entirely pleased to see one of her children. And this was exactly what she had just been talking about. How lovely it would be to have a cottage of her own, or even rooms above a smithy, with a front door she could shut and lock against all comers if she wanted. But how dreadful of her even to think of locking her own children out of her home.
Owen chatted cheerfully about his journey during the short drive. He hugged her again after they had stepped inside the house.
“I would kill for a cup of tea, Mama,” he said. “But I will run up to my room first and freshen up a bit before joining you in the drawing room. My valet should be here with all my baggage fairly soon, though it may be too late for me to change for dinner. I hope you will not mind dining informally tonight.”
“Of course I will not,” she told him. “I will refrain from wearing a tiara and diamonds.”
He laughed. “I decided that, after all, Ravenswood held more lure for me than London,” he said.
“Even before the end of the Season?” She raised her eyebrows.
“All those parties and such become remarkably tedious after a time,” he said, setting an arm about her shoulders. “I’ll kick about here for the summer if you can bear my company.”
He smiled at her, using all his considerable charm—her tall, lean, handsome young son with his finely chiseled features and slightly overlong near-blond hair.
“What happened to your work at the home for delinquent boys?” she asked him.
“Oh, God, that!” he said, raking the fingers of one hand through his hair. “Whoever had the asinine idea that giving such boys a clean bed and new clothes, nutritious food, and a decent education would render them grateful in return and remorseful for past sins and devoted to virtue and goodness forever after was an idiot. They are, of course, little horrors. But the only remedy anyone can dream up is to concoct a long list of rules and double and triple them until the boys’ old lives begin to look vastly more appealing than the new. There has to be another way.”
“Go and freshen up, Owen,” she told him. “I will have a pot of tea waiting for you in the drawing room.”
“Make it an extra-large pot,” he said before bounding off, taking the stairs two at a time just as though he were still fifteen instead of twenty-two.
Clarissa was waiting for him when he joined her ten minutes later, rubbing his hands together and still smiling cheerfully.
“I am glad to see you have had the fire lit,” he said. “What a chilly day it is out there. I do not know what happened to the sun. You are looking well, Mama. I enjoyed seeing a few familiar faces close to home. Mrs. Danver and Eluned Rhys were coming out of the shop and waved to me as I drove by on the other side of the green. Cam Holland waved from the doorway of the smithy. And then there was Mr. Taylor down by the bridge, on his way home from some archery practice. Walking back from the village, were you?”
He took his cup of tea from her hand and added a biscuit to his saucer before sitting down and smiling at her even more cheerfully. “It is good to be home,” he said. “I ought to have come with you and given you my company from the start. I am sorry I did not.”
She gazed steadily at him after seating herself beside the fireplace. She took a sip from her cup. “I suppose there was an emergency family conference,” she said. “A somewhat depleted one since Pippa and Lucas and Stephanie had already left town. I suppose you were the one chosen, as it was easier for you than for any of the others simply to hop in your curricle and give the horses their head once you had turned them in this direction.”
He made a valiant attempt to look blank.
“Who wrote from here?” she asked. “Was it one person or multiple persons?”
“Wrote?” He frowned, his cup suspended halfway to his lips.
“Let me see,” she said. “The writer would have been concerned. There were the beginnings of some talk, though nothing vicious, of course. And there was no suggestion of anything improper. The very idea! But perhaps Lord Stratton would wish to consider how it appeared for his mother to be at Ravenswood alone. And how it must feel to her. She must surely be missing her family and the company with which she is usually surrounded. Some possibly unsuitable people were taking advantage of her good nature and pressing their company upon her when perhaps there ought to be someone here to keep such persons mindful of the fact that she has relatives to protect both her and her reputation from such presumption. She was actually persuaded, for example, to walk in the park with Mr. Matthew Taylor and share a picnic with him at the lake. The village carpenter. Am I reasonably close, Owen?”
He had the grace to look a bit flustered. When he bit into his biscuit, a shower of crumbs landed on his coat and pantaloons. He tried to brush them off with the back of the hand that held the remains of the biscuit, but another shower followed the first.
“Idris happened to mention it in a letter to Gwyneth,” he said. “He is her brother, Mama, and Devlin used to be his best friend when they were boys. Lord Hardington wrote to Uncle George too, but only to advise him to ignore any foolish gossip he heard about you. In his opinion there is no one more respectable than you.”
“Hence the family conference,” Clarissa said.
“It was hardly a conference, Mama,” Owen said. He set aside his cup and saucer and laboriously brushed crumbs into his hand. “We all dined with Gwyneth and Dev, and the letters were mentioned. That was all. I wanted to come here. Are you not happy to see me?”
She sighed. “I am always happy to see you, Owen,” she said. “Even so, I wish you had not come. You will be bored to tears. Besides, I do not need a guardian or a chaperon. I tried to tell you all before I left that I wished to be alone for a while, that I looked forward to enjoying my own company and deciding what sort of future I want for myself.”
“Like marrying Lord Keilly?” he said. “You could do worse, but you could probably do better too. He is a bit of a dry old stick, is he not? Though I ought not to have said that aloud. Maybe you really do plan to marry him.”
“Future plans for a woman need not always involve marriage,” she said. “It was all I thought of once upon a time, admittedly. I married your father when I was seventeen. I did it freely and gladly and did not regret it. But I am going to be fifty soon, Owen. I may want—in fact, I probably will want—something different now. Like friendships with people of my own choosing. Throughout my girlhood, until I married, I had a very close friendship with Matthew Taylor. I am not sure you are aware of that. The Taylors lived right next to Grandmama and Grandpapa Greenfield. They still do.”
“But things have changed since then, surely, Mama,” he said. “He is a carpenter now. He lives above the smithy, for the love of God. I have the greatest respect for him. He is the best wood-carver and the best archer I have ever encountered, yet he is very modest about both. It would be hard not to like him, in fact. But…well, you are a Ware. Of Ravenswood. The Countess of Stratton.”
“The dowager countess,” she said.
“Even so,” he said. “It really is presumptuous of him to take advantage of your being alone here by trying to revive an old—a very old—friendship.”
“It was I who suggested that we renew it,” she said.
He gazed at her, a troubled frown on his face.
His tea, she could see, was cold in the cup, and his saucer was an untidy mess of crumbs he had dumped there. She emptied the cup into the slop basin and shook the crumbs into it too before removing the cozy from the teapot and pouring him another cup. She placed a fresh biscuit on the saucer.
“In the two and a half weeks since I came home,” she said, “I have spent a great deal of time alone, both indoors and out, just as I planned. I have called upon friends and neighbors and received their calls. I have attended church. I have been twice to visit your grandparents—it was Grandmama’s seventieth birthday last weekend, as you perhaps recall. I have written letters. I have behaved in exemplary fashion, in fact. But of course I have added a friend to my repertoire. An old friend, now new again. We have sat up in the temple folly and strolled in the park. We have walked to the eastern boundary and climbed the hills for a better view. We have picnicked at the lake and rowed on the water. I have watched him practice shooting his arrows and marveled at his skill. We have sat in the summerhouse and drunk lemonade. And today, just before you arrived home, I took him to see the clearing on the bank of the river where I am going to persuade Devlin to allow me to build a dower house—a cottage that will be all my own while I live.”
“A dower house?” He gaped at her. “When you have all of Ravenswood Hall as a home? Mama. Whatever has come over you? It seems to me I have come home just in time.”
“To bring me back under control?” she said, smiling fondly and with considerable amusement at him.
“I hardly recognize you,” he said.
“Good.” She laughed outright. “The time I have spent alone here has borne some fruit, then.”
He opened his mouth to speak again, but she held up a hand. “Drink your tea before that too turns cold,” she said. “Inevitably, Owen, people have noticed that Matthew and I have spent some time together, though it has not been a great deal. He is, after all, a workingman, and I have come here deliberately to enjoy some solitude—which I have been doing. A few people have given each of us gentle warnings of possible gossip. At first I was a little alarmed, as was he. And he may yet decide that it would be unwise to consort further with me. For my part, I refuse to give up what makes me happy just because the general consensus may be that being friends with a gentleman-turned-carpenter is not quite what might be expected of a dowager countess.”
“He makes you happy, Mama?” Owen asked, frowning again.
“Being with him makes me happy,” she said. “I am reminded of my girlhood, a very happy time in my life. And he played a large part in my happiness then. We played and laughed together. We talked endlessly of anything and everything that came to our minds. After thirty-three years we are discovering that all that has not changed. Everyone should be fortunate enough to enjoy such a friendship.”
“You play?” he asked, sounding aghast.
She laughed again. “I did tell you we took a boat out on the lake,” she said. “We also landed on the island and went exploring. Do you remember the days when we did that, Owen, and you children peopled the Dark Forest with all sorts of monsters and villains and wild beasts and went to vanquish them?”
“You explored the island?” he said.
“We did, though all we found was a mother duck and her ducklings, bobbing out toward open water,” she said. She could not resist continuing. “And when we climbed the hills on the eastern edge of the park, we did not walk the whole length of the roadway over them. We found the least steep descent directly to the park and climbed and scrambled and ran down it.”
“You were on foot?” he said. “And you ran down one of those slopes? I almost broke my neck the only time I tried it, and Ben threatened to tan my hide if I ever did it again. Not that he ever carried out any of those threats, but I was never willing to take the chance.”
She smiled at him. If she had heard about that descent of his at the time, she would probably have had a fit of the vapors.
He heaved a great sigh and set down his almost-empty cup.
“Whatever am I going to do with you, Mama?” he said. “If this connection with Mr. Taylor blows up into a full scandal, you know, all the blame will be heaped upon me.”
“I will tell you what you are going to do,” she said. “Tomorrow you are going to take me in your curricle all about the perimeter of the park and even up over the hills. And you are going to name to me every flower we see. There are so many of them blooming right now, with many more to come, that I find it impossible to identify more than half of them. You used to be very good at knowing them all. If there was one even the gardeners could not name, we always consulted you.”
“I daresay I made things up from time to time,” he said.
“Tomorrow,” she said. “Right after breakfast.”
He grimaced.
—
Miss Wexford was euphoric. Her new dining table was in place in the dining room, larger and more imposing than the old one, weighing considerably more, steady on its many broad feet, ornately carved, and surpassing in splendor even the most extravagant of her dreams. She would not cover it with a cloth, she told Matthew and her brother. Not, at least, until all her friends and neighbors had been given the chance to admire it.
“I hope you understand, Prue,” Colonel Wexford said, “that we are going to be stuck living at this house until we die, and probably Ariel after us. Every one of the male indoor servants and every one of the gardeners and grooms, not to mention my valet, has threatened to quit my service en masse if they are ever again called upon to lift that table.”
“Oh, Andrew!” Miss Wexford exclaimed with glee. “My brother does like his little joke, Mr. Taylor. Take no notice of him.”
She was going to plan a party to show off her new possession, she announced, and she made her own prediction that within a week of the party Matthew would have so many new commissions he would have to give up sleeping at night. The idea caused her a great deal more merriment, while Matthew wondered if he was doomed to having the Wexford table become his artistic legacy to the world.
But he was touched to have given so much pleasure and was smiling as he climbed the outside stairs to his rooms a little later. Someone hailed him from the street before he reached the top. He was unsurprised to see that it was Owen Ware, who was coming from the direction of the inn. The boy must have been watching for him—though he must get out of this habit of thinking of men in their twenties and thirties as boys. It was a symptom of his own advancing age, he supposed.
“I would like a word with you, Mr. Taylor,” Owen said. “Perhaps I could buy you a pint of ale?”
“You had better come on up,” Matthew said, imagining how the landlord and any patrons who happened to be taking midafternoon refreshments at the inn would strain their ears to overhear the conversation if they went there. “I’ll make us both a cup of tea.”
He went inside his rooms and left the door open while he started a fire in the stove and filled the kettle from a large pitcher of water in the corner. He heard the door close quietly.
“Ah, that lovely smell of wood,” Owen said. “I suppose you are so used to it that you scarcely notice it any longer.”
“I try not to take anything in my life for granted,” Matthew said. “Have a seat at the table.”
Owen sat and ran his hand over the smooth surface. “I suppose you made this yourself,” he said. “It must be marvelous to have a skill like that. One thing about growing up in a wealthy, privileged home is that one ends up pretty useless by the time one reaches adulthood. Everything practical is done by someone else who is paid for doing it.”
It was not exactly how Matthew had imagined this conversation beginning. He took the chair across from Owen’s, since the stove and the kettle would take a while to perform their tasks.
“One can always learn what one wants or needs to learn but did not learn during boyhood,” he said.
“Is that what you did?” Owen asked. “You are Reginald Taylor’s brother, are you not? My grandparents’ neighbor. I suppose you were a younger son.”
“As are you,” Matthew said. “Youngest son in your case.”
“Except that in my case there is plenty of wealth to go around,” Owen said. “I do not have to do a day’s work in my life if I choose not to.”
“Would a life of idleness satisfy your soul?” Matthew asked.
“That is an odd way of putting it,” Owen said. “Satisfy my soul? I suppose you expect that as the third son I am going to be a clergyman.”
“I would guess it is something you do not wish to do,” Matthew said. “What do you want to do?”
“Well, there you have me,” Owen said. “I am twenty-two years old and do not know what I want to do when I grow up. It is as frustrating as hell. I want to use my privilege and relative wealth to help those who have nothing, but as soon as I put the thought into words I feel the distinct urge to stick a finger down my throat and vomit. I expect to look in a mirror to see a halo hovering above my head. I do not like self-righteous piety. I do not know what I want.”
“Give it time,” Matthew said. “Do not try to press the issue, especially as there is no compulsion upon you to do something in order to avoid starvation. Life has a way of leading a person in the right direction if that person does not try to get in the way.”
“Is that what happened to you?” Owen asked. “How did you end up here? It could not have been what you expected when you were growing up. Was it?”
The kettle was boiling and Matthew got up to make the tea. He covered the teapot with the patchwork cozy he had bought at the last fete and set it on the table to steep. He set sugar and milk beside it with a slop basin and strainer, and put the only two matched cups and saucers he owned before them.
“I always felt a compulsion to whittle wood,” he said. “I thought of it as a hobby, one at which I was not very good. I never made the association with carpentry and the chance of making a living with it. That understanding came gradually while I was wandering about Europe, not thinking of anything in particular except picking up the odd job here and there and seeing what was to be seen. By the time I came back to England—oh, about the time you were being born, I suppose—I knew without any doubt what I wanted to do and how I wanted to live. I had learned the necessary skills at the hands of masters.”
“So you settled here,” Owen said, looking about the room while Matthew poured the tea, having ascertained that his guest took both milk and a little sugar in his tea. “You have been here for most if not all of my life. Did you never have the ambition to expand the business with employees working under you and a fortune building in some bank for your future needs?”
“No,” Matthew said.
“Are you sorry now you were not a bit more ambitious when you were younger?” Owen asked as he stirred his tea.
“No,” Matthew said.
Owen tapped his wet spoon against the rim of his cup and set it down in the saucer. He looked up and met Matthew’s gaze directly across the table. He was looking a bit white about the mouth, Matthew thought. He was about to get to the point, it seemed.
“What is your interest in my mother?” he asked.
It was what Matthew had expected him to ask as soon as he walked through the door, but more belligerently expressed, perhaps.
“Lady Stratton was a close friend of mine years and years ago, before she married your father,” he said. “Before I married. After that she moved way up on the social scale and I moved way down—deliberately so on both our parts. It is a number of years since your father passed on. It is many years since my wife died. In fact, she passed a year after we married of complications following childbirth. Our daughter died too. We have discovered in the last few weeks, your mother and I, that our friendship never fully expired but lay dormant all these years. We have enjoyed a few outings together—all on Ravenswood land—and lengthy conversations. I am not ambitious, not in my professional life and not in my personal life. And I believe your mother can be trusted always to do what is right and best for her and all who love her.”
“She is talking about building a cottage on the edge of the park,” Owen said. “A sort of dower house, for the love of God. She showed me the place this morning. As though Ravenswood were not large enough to house the five thousand in some comfort. And as though Dev and Gwyn and the rest of us did not love her. As though she wanted to get away from us and shut the door in our faces. It is dashed upsetting, that is what it is. What have we done to her to make her change like this? What have you done?”
“Perhaps,” Matthew said, wading into waters he would probably be better advised to avoid, “you ought to try looking at the situation from your mother’s point of view.”
“I suppose she has told you we neglect her,” Owen said. “And to our shame, we did allow her to come home alone a few weeks ago instead of insisting that she stay awhile longer and then go with Dev or Pippa or Uncle George to spend the summer. Or instead of me insisting that I come home with her. I feel hellishly guilty, I do not mind admitting, about being so selfish and staying in London only because I thought I would be bored silly here. I put my own pleasure before my mother. Whom I adore, I would have you know.”
His voice was wobbling a bit. He was not far from tears, Matthew guessed as he poured him another cup of tea.
“Your mother has told me just the opposite of what you assume,” Matthew said. “She has told me all her children and her brother and her friend, his wife, shower love upon her and include her in all their activities and make sure she is never alone or lonely. Has it occurred to you—though apparently she has tried to explain to you herself—that she craves some time alone in which to assess her life now that you are all grown up? Has it occurred to you that she is a person as well as your mother? Who loves you all very dearly, I might add.”
He wondered if he had gone too far. He had not planned to say anything at all. He guessed that most of what Owen had said so far was unplanned too.
“I beg your pardon,” Matthew said. “All this is none of my business.”
“I was sent,” Owen said, “or rather, I came to warn you off from taking advantage of Mama’s being alone here, without any of us to protect her. I suppose…it is hard to think of one’s own mother as a person. As someone who had a life long before one was born. And who still has a life after one has grown up.”
Matthew held his peace and Owen got to his feet.
“Now I feel like an idiot,” he said. “I ought to have planted you a facer as soon as I came inside. I ought to have let Dev come. Or Uncle George. Sometimes I wish Nick was already back in England. It seems as though he has been gone forever with his regiment. It has been ten years. Only ten years, you may think. But ten years to me is almost half my life. I have no backbone. That is my problem. And I like you, Mr. Taylor. You have always been my idol as an archer. Where did you learn that, by the way?”
“You have backbone.” Matthew set a hand on his shoulder and squeezed. “More important, you also have a heart. I cannot promise that my renewed friendship with your mother will end, Owen. That will be up to her, and up to me too. But I will never do anything to dishonor her. That is a promise I can safely make.”
He dared not think how close he had come to doing just that out at the lake a few days ago. It would not happen again.
“That will have to be good enough for everyone,” Owen said rather bitterly as he made his way to the door. “Or, if they do not like it, they will have to come and confront you themselves. Thank you for the tea. Mama would consider it far too strong, but I like it this way.”
And he opened the door, let himself out, and closed it behind him.
Matthew found himself thinking, of all things, about the tea he had taken for them to drink up on the hilltop. After sitting for several hours in the flask, it had been twice as strong as what he had just drunk with Owen. Yet she had said it was the best picnic she had ever had. How smoothly she lied.
He found himself chuckling when surely he ought to be feeling anything but amusement.