Chapter 11 #2
She had outgrown her childish fear and come to love storms, feeling curiously attuned to them, especially today, when the air hung heavy over Chavensworth, and the clouds dropped lower over the land.
Softly, she stroked the back of her mother’s hand. Morna felt even colder today than she had the day before, as if she were dying by degrees.
Sarah took a deep breath, wondering what she could tell her mother that wouldn’t worry her on the off chance that she truly could hear her.
Chavensworth’s finances? Never as grim in Morna’s days of caring for the estate.
Her marriage? What could she possibly divulge to her mother?
That Douglas Eston was inciting her to abandon, and she’d never felt so depraved or excited.
Perhaps it wasn’t Douglas’s fault at all but some flaw in her own nature.
A flaw further magnified when she’d awakened this morning and been disappointed to find him gone.
She stood, walked to the French windows, opened them, and left the room, closing the doors behind her.
Before she had this room transformed into her mother’s sickroom, it had been the Summer Parlor, a room that looked out over the Greek Garden and a small brick patio just like the Duchess’s Suite on the floor above.
She wrapped her arms around her waist and looked up at the sky. Did God truly live in the heavens? Or was He in every place and everything?
The wind tossed her hair, and threatened the care with which Florie had arranged it. She felt like pulling every pin from her hair, throwing them on the ground, heedless and reckless, as if daring God and the coming storm.
No one would call her feckless. No one would think of her as having a rebellious nature. If given an unattainable goal, she somehow attained it. If handed an unbearable circumstance, she nonetheless endured it. Lady Sarah coped.
She heard a sound behind her and turned to see Hester opening the door.
“Come in, Lady Sarah. It’s dangerous out there with the storm.”
She didn’t want to go inside. She didn’t want to be safe. Besides, nothing was truly safe anywhere, was it? She had gone to London, to her father’s home, and found herself married because of it. She had come home to Chavensworth, and her mother was dying within its walls. Where was the safety?
“I’ll be fine,” she said, but had to raise her voice over the sound of the wind. “I just need some air.”
Hester looked doubtful, but she’d had enough of Hester’s care. Let Hester dole out her compassion to her mother. The entire world should weep because this sweet and generous soul was dying.
She turned away and began to walk, leaving the patio and its hedge border, down past the rose garden and the intricate ornamental garden crafted from boxwoods. The clouds lowered still farther, the wind picked up, gusts drifting beneath her skirt, billowing the fabric into a perfect circle.
How immodest.
She didn’t care. How very odd was that? She always cared.
She was very decorous in her appearance at all times, even around Chavensworth, even when she was ill.
At those infrequent times when she didn’t leave her bed, she insisted that her face be washed and her hair brushed and arranged in a pleasing manner.
She had never been abandoned.
Nothing Douglas had done the night before had been without her willing participation.
Still and all, it seemed so hideously decadent and improper that she warmed even now thinking of it.
He had touched her with silken fingers and whispered words, and her entire body had curled around him like a new leaf.
She was a virgin, but after last night she considered herself a little more knowledgeable.
If not about passion itself, then about her reaction to it.
Sarah entered the Greek Garden. She’d learned more about the opposite sex studying those statues than in her two seasons in London.
When she’d been a child, her mother had put skirts on two or three of them, but Sarah had waited until she was alone and raised the hem and looked underneath.
Only later had she learned the skirts were kilts, and that discovery had led to learning that her mother was Scottish.
Douglas was more physically gifted than any of the young Greek statues in the garden. His thighs were more muscular, his calves better developed. His manhood, that curious appendage never covered by a fig leaf in the Greek Garden, was much longer and thicker.
They were boys, and he was a man.
His thick black hair was cut a little shorter than was fashionable.
Clean-shaven, he had a carved, high-cheekboned face and blue-green eyes that showed what the Mediterranean must look like on a summer day.
Each time he came into a room, the air seemed to hum, as if he were an important personage, a member of the royal family, a man of deep and consuming public interest.
She circled the statues like greeting old friends, making mental notes of their condition, and where some needed to be repaired. Perhaps it was time to move some of the older statues inside, at least during the more punishing winter months.
In the middle of the garden was a luckinbooth, a Scottish symbol of two hearts entwined and topped with a heart. The luckinbooth had been started when her mother had first come to Chavensworth. The gardeners had followed her plan, and now the intricate design was fully formed in mature boxwoods.
Sarah’s hands fell to her sides, and she continued walking, past the lane that led to the sloping hill with its lone tree, the site of so many picnics.
How many times had they gone there together, just she and her mother?
The last time had been only two years ago, and already signs of weakness had slowed Morna’s walk.
She’d been winded by the time they reached the oak, and even though she had waved aside Sarah’s concern, there had been shadows beneath her eyes and a slight bluish tint to her lips.
Sarah wished the heavens would open up and the air turn white with rain. No one would be able to tell her tears from the downpour then. Now, however, they chilled her face as they were blown away by the wind.
She found herself walking toward the stables, taking the gravel path to the right and, at the fork in the lane, abruptly changing directions and veering to the left.
There was one place at Chavensworth where no one would disturb her.
Only one place she could go and sob in solitude.
Where neither footman nor maid or housekeeper or steward would dare open the door and intrude upon her privacy.
From her childhood on, she’d always sought refuge in her grandfather’s observatory.
The same man who made life miserable for her now with his heritage of the Henley Gift had created a magical place from which to view the stars.
When her father had moved away from Chavensworth, taking up residence in London, she’d gone to the observatory.
When her mother had first become ill, Sarah went there.
When she fancied herself in love during her first season, only for the young man to offer for another’s hand, she’d returned home from London and immediately gone to the observatory where she sat listening to the sough of the wind around the oddly shaped building.
How very foolish she had been, and how very foolish she felt right now.
She was no longer a woman past the first blush of youth, but a child at this moment.
She wanted comfort from the very woman who could not give it to her.
She wanted her mother to tell her that things would be all right, but she was very much afraid they weren’t going to be, ever again.
Sarah wanted her to sit up in her bed and announce she was famished, that it was time she was up and about.
Sarah knew, however, that as much as she wished for something, as much as she wanted it, wishes and wants did not make them happen.
A wagon sat in the middle of the path. As she watched, Douglas left the observatory, went to the side of the wagon, and grabbed another crate. As he lifted it, he looked up and saw her.
At least he was fully dressed.
But, really, should she be able to remember the sight of him naked so clearly?