Three
Gavin was always happier out of doors. And so when the duke was up and ready for an early morning ride the next day, Gavin felt slightly more in charity with him. Very slightly. The quality of the fellow’s mount was another recommendation. Grooms had brought Tereford’s riding stock up to Yorkshire in easy stages, it appeared, and the animals were among the finest Gavin had ever seen. He had to admire the ease with which the duke sat on the spirited mount too. He was obviously at home in the saddle.
Gavin led him down a track through the moor where there was no risk of rabbit holes. Whatever he thought of the man, he wouldn’t risk the horses.
There was no need to talk if they kept up a brisk pace. But Gavin found that the absence of conversation left him free to think about his encounter on the stairs last night. The flash of… He decided to call it intense awareness. That was a tolerable label. Unlike some others that…did not apply. He wouldn’t think about those. It had been surprise, mainly. He’d been taken unaware. Suddenly, there had been Rose, inches away and so softly pretty. Some sort of startlement in her blue eyes. She’d swayed. He’d reached out instinctively. And then they’d come to their senses and shaken off…whatever. It had been very strange.
In recent years, he hadn’t thought of Rose as Rose, the girl who’d roamed the moors with him and lent her vivid imagination to their group’s adventures. They’d grown up. She was a Denholme as he was a Keighley, members of families who were fiercely at odds. He seldom saw her. When they did meet, they exchanged barbs in passing. Many of them were remarks they’d more or less inherited from their elders, Gavin realized now. His mother was very free with those. But last night, there Rose was, as lovely as her name…
“It’s an odd landscape,” said the duke at his side.
“Eh.” Gavin’s mind swam back from far away.
“It’s as if a great dun carpet had been thrown over uneven ground.”
“If you look more closely, you’ll see a marvelous design worked into that ‘carpet.’” Not that an outsider would ever understand the moors.
The duke looked startled. Clearly, he had thought Gavin was a brutish dolt and would not be capable of extending his comparison. “Design?” he asked.
“And in June…” Gavin’s voice broke off. He wasn’t here to describe a sea of blossom, the lazy hum of bees, moorland ponies outlined by a crimson sunset. He’d been sent to gain an advantage, not teach the Duke of Tereford to love the moors. Better that he didn’t actually. Aversion would keep him away. “It’s not your kind of country, I suppose,” he said instead. “You won’t spend much time here. At Yerndon, I mean.”
“Probably not,” the duke replied.
That was honest at least. There was no affection in his tone for the place Gavin loved.
“You mainly raise sheep here?” Tereford asked. “For the wool?”
“Aye,” replied Gavin. “Best quality.”
“They must be a hardy breed.”
“They’re fine for those who tend their lands.”
“As Yerndon has not been tended,” the duke said.
“It has not.” This could be his opening. Gavin searched for the right phrase.
“I should find a responsible tenant. Perhaps you know of someone?”
Gavin’s temper rose. “Are you mocking me?”
“No.” Tereford smiled. “Perhaps teasing a bit. I beg your pardon. I had no right.”
Wrestling down his irritation, Gavin said nothing.
“So the tangle over this property began several generations ago? I didn’t quite understand the…debate between you and Miss Denholme when I arrived.”
Here was his chance. Tell the duke the whole story, his mother had commanded. Make him see the justice of their claim and the Denholmes’ deception. Talk him around. As if Gavin had any skill at such things. He liked to do, not debate.
He pushed aside his doubts. “It was 1715, or thereabouts,” he began. The tale was very familiar, at least. It was like a fairy story, though real, of course. “Laura Keighley—my several times great-aunt—went down to London and contracted a grand match. The son of a duke—Lord Edwin Cantrell.”
“Edwin,” said Tereford. He shook his head. “I don’t recall any mention of him. But I believe there were a number of sons in that generation of Cantrells.”
“He was a younger one,” Gavin replied. “I don’t think the Keighleys understood how insignificant that made him.” Gavin’s mother had much to say about their stupidity.
The duke gave him a wry glance.
Gavin ignored it. “The family expected every kind of benefit from the marriage. A touch of nobility,” he sneered. “The land around Yerndon was given as her dowry.”
“All of it?” asked the duke.
This was a tricky point. Gavin had hoped it wouldn’t be raised. “A large part of the acreage,” he answered.
“I seemed to hear that some of it came from the Denholme family.”
The fellow had sharp ears, damn him. “Laura died young,” Gavin continued. “And Cantrell married again. Dora Denholme.”
“And she brought the rest of the land as her portion?”
“Yes.” Gavin rushed on. “Cantrell turned out to be a wastrel, an aristocratic idiot.” Realizing that his companion was a Cantrell and might not appreciate this label, Gavin faltered briefly. “The connection meant nothing in the end. The Keighleys had given up their land for nothing. And we never give up our land.”
“This Edwin sired a son who inherited Yerndon?” the duke asked.
Gavin nodded.
“By which of his wives?”
Gavin looked away. “Dora.”
“I see. And this line has managed the estate?”
“If you want to call it managing.” Gavin didn’t. More often they’d pulled money out and gone off to visit their grand relatives.
“And it endured up until the last Cantrell, who willed it to the previous duke? My predecessor.”
“A man who cared nothing about the place and left it to rot,” Gavin replied contemptuously. “He never even came here.” It was an unforgivable lapse, to him.
Tereford nodded. “My great-uncle was not a good steward.”
Gavin snorted agreement.
There was a pause, and then the duke said, “Tell me, Sir Gavin, when you marry, if your wife brings you a dowry, will you feel it remains the property of her family? Even after her death?”
That was not the rule of law, Gavin acknowledged silently. His mother always argued fairness over legality. “The land was meant to stay with the Keighley line,” he replied. “And Laura Keighley had no children.”
The duke nodded. “So you feel that your family made an…investment, more than a century ago, which did not pay off. And now you would like to have it back.”
When it was put that way, it sounded a bit dodgy, Gavin thought. His parents and grandparents never stated things so baldly.
“I’m not really persuaded by that argument,” added the duke.
At this point, his mother would have flown into a rage and shouted, Gavin thought. And that wouldn’t have done any good either. The duke would have simply stared at her, with his maddening self-possession. Her idea that the duke would hand over Yerndon was daft. This visit was not only burdensome; it was a waste of time.
Gavin urged his horse into a gallop. Riding hell for leather was a good way to drive problems from one’s brain. And if he went hard and fast enough, perhaps the duke would take a spill. He’d like to see him, and his lamentable logic, tumble into a thorny thicket. Nothing serious, just a few humiliating scrapes.
But his wish was not granted. He simply discovered that Tereford was a bruising rider, perhaps better than Gavin himself. There seemed no challenge he couldn’t rise to, the pillock.
Rose left the house with the duchess soon after breakfast. Cloaked and gloved, they walked out into a dew-covered late March morning. Drops sparkled on budding branches and in the long grass. Mist drifted over the heather in the distance, and long shadows crossed their path. Rose carried her specimen box on a strap. Taking it along was so automatic that she didn’t even think. When the duchess asked what it was, however, she regretted that habit. Some of her friends, and particularly her mother, found her dedication to preserving moorland plants eccentric. A fashionable Londoner would probably find it bewildering. Still, Rose explained her method.
“How interesting,” said the duchess. “These samples last well?”
“If they are properly dried and handled carefully,” Rose replied. “I mount them in notebooks.”
“I should like to see some of them.”
Rose nodded, taking this for mere politeness.
They strolled along, dawdled really. Left to herself, Rose would have tramped off for a long, brisk ramble. But she wasn’t here to please herself. She was supposed to be charming and to press the Denholme land claim, wresting Yerndon away from the duke. Had no one considered that these were contradictory aims? But careful consideration was not a hallmark of the neighborhood feud. “When will your baby arrive?” she asked the duchess.
“Early summer.”
“That’s a lovely time of year here.”
“Is it? Not much has been done with the garden.”
Rose looked back. A low stone wall surrounded the patch of land near the house. Some scraggly plantings showed above the grass. Rose preferred the wild parts of the moor, but she enjoyed a fine garden as well. This was not one.
“You’d think they might have planted a shrubbery to provide some shelter,” the duchess went on. “I expect it is terrible when winter storms sweep in.”
Rose wouldn’t have said terrible, but it could be cold and windy. “Will you be here in the winter?” she asked.
“No.”
There was no equivocation in the word, no hint of doubt. Rose examined her companion’s lovely face. She seemed daunted by the sights before her.
“The moor looks grim now,” the duchess added. “I can’t think what it must be like in January.”
“It isn’t grim,” said Rose.
“You don’t think so?”
“It’s beautiful.”
“One’s home country is always dear, but…”
“There are tiny streams with hidden waterfalls,” Rose said. “And ravines full of flowers. Look there.” She pointed to a bloom at the side of the path. “Asphodel.”
“It is pretty.”
“I could show you some lovely spots,” Rose said, her enthusiasm for the moor surfacing. She enjoyed showing it off.
“Are they far away?”
Rose hesitated, doubting they had the same definition of far.
The duchess smiled as if she understood this. “I would like to walk a bit. Let us see what we can find.”
They left the confines of the house and went along a winding sheep path. Heather rose on each side, cutting the wind and muffling sound. Rose took a breath. Something deep inside her relaxed.
They moved slowly along the beaten earth. “Stay away from places like that,” said Rose when they passed a patch of bog. “Never walk where it is so green.”
“Why?” asked the duchess.
“You will most likely sink in. And might find it hard to get back out again.”
“Ah.” The duchess edged away from the boggy spot.
“That is cloudberry,” Rose said as they moved on. “When they’re ripe, you can use them in jam and juice. Liqueurs too.”
“You know this place in your very bones.”
Surprised and flattered, Rose smiled at her.
“You know, that’s the first time I’ve seen you really smile.” The duchess smiled back.
It was a kind smile. She was a pleasant woman, Rose thought. Not some rapacious interloper. Not pretentious either, despite her beauty and status. The things Rose’s parents had been saying about the Terefords weren’t true.
Rose gazed over the moor as they walked along. The Cantrell family had become mythic villains to the Denholmes. And perhaps the last resident of Yerndon had deserved some of their criticisms. From all accounts, he’d been a sour, spiteful old man. But the current duke and duchess were nothing like that. They were treating her well, and the feel of their household was warm and accepting. The pair obviously loved each other. Their servants seemed contented as well as efficient, which was always a sign. Rose still didn’t understand why she’d been invited to visit, but the stay was making her think.
High-pitched voices sounded from the path ahead. They came around a clump of gorse and out onto a wider track where they discovered two shaggy moorland ponies plodding toward them. The animals had thick sheepskin pads on their backs and carried a whole gaggle of pale, brown-haired children. “Goodness,” said the duchess.
The ponies slowed and then stopped a few yards away.
“Hello,” said the duchess. “Are you out for a ride?”
The child who seemed oldest—a girl—nodded. She couldn’t be more than eight or nine, Rose thought, but she looked self-possessed and in charge. She held a little boy and a tiny girl before her. On the other pony a girl of perhaps six or seven supported another a year or so younger. They were well dressed and seemed at ease despite the absence of any adult. Rose was surprised not to recognize them. She knew all the families hereabouts.
“My name is Cecelia,” her companion continued. “And this is Miss Rose Denholme.”
The eldest child examined them carefully. Their appearance apparently satisfied her because she said, “I am Maria Bront?.” She indicated the children before her on the pony. “This is my brother, Branwell, and my sister Emily.” Pointing at the other mount, she added, “Those are my sisters Elizabeth and Charlotte.”
“Anne isn’t here because she’s just a baby,” said the boy. He looked not more than four, but he spoke quite clearly.
They all seemed like babies to Rose.
“How do you do,” responded the duchess. “Are you lost?”
“No,” Maria declared with unusual assurance. “We are learning our way about the moors.” She seemed to feel this was a perfectly reasonable activity for five small children on their own.
“We are engraving the pathways on our memories,” said Elizabeth from the other pony.
“Indebly,” added Charlotte.
“In-del-ibly,” corrected Maria. Charlotte mouthed the syllables silently.
They all seemed to be unusual children, Rose thought. She couldn’t understand where they’d come from. Then she remembered a piece of news. “Bront?,” she said. “Have you recently come to live at Haworth parsonage?”
Maria nodded, grave and thoughtful far beyond her years.
“Your father is the new curate at the church in the village,” Rose said.
“He deserves a finer post,” said the younger girl on the other pony. “He is far better educated…”
“Charlotte!” Her eldest sister glared at her.
“I heard him tell…”
“And you know you are not to repeat all you hear.”
“But Papa said…”
“That wagging tongues are the devil’s tools.”
Charlotte looked subdued.
“What about your mother?” asked the duchess.
“Mama is ill, and we are keeping the children out of her way,” said the older girl on the second pony. Elizabeth, Rose remembered. She spoke as if she wasn’t a child herself.
“Except for Anne,” offered the boy. “She can’t sit up properly, so she had to stay home.” He appeared to savor his superiority in this regard.
“She is just a few months old, Branwell,” replied Charlotte.
“That’s what I said,” he replied.
“My cook is making treacle tarts today,” said the duchess. “Will you stop in for a visit with us and have some?”
“No, thank you,” said Maria without hesitation.
Branwell turned in his seat to glare up at her. “Why not?”
“What is treacle tart?” asked the tiny Emily before him.
“A sweet,” answered her brother. “You’ve never had one. Why can’t we, Maria?”
They were all thin and delicate-looking. Ethereal as elves, Rose thought. One wanted to give them any number of treats.
“Greed is a sin, Branwell,” said Maria.
The boy made a rude noise.
“Branwell! What would Papa say if we indulged ourselves?”
“Piggishly,” said Elizabeth.
“We needn’t tell him,” suggested the little boy.
Rose wondered what it was like to be the only son among so many sisters.
“We cannot lie!” Maria looked scandalized.
“Not telling isn’t the same as lying.”
Maria gazed down at him, more in sorrow than anger it seemed. “I have grave concerns about the state of your soul, Branwell.”
He was a toddler, Rose thought. Would his father really begrudge him a bit of pastry?
Emily stared back at Maria with great haunted eyes. On the other pony, Charlotte looked wistful.
“Besides,” said Maria. “We are not to be speaking to people or going off with strangers.”
This sounded like something their nurse had told them, Rose thought. And good advice, of course. “We are not strangers but neighbors,” she said. “My father called on yours when you first arrived. Perhaps you saw him. Mr. Denholme.”
“I remember,” said Charlotte. “Because it sounded like where foxes would live. He was the man with no hair.”
Rose bit her lip. Her father’s baldness was a sore point with him.
Maria nodded in recognition.
“And we are neighbors of your neighbors,” said the duchess. “So practically acquainted already. I think you might stop in for refreshment.”
“Mightn’t we have just a bite?” Elizabeth asked Maria. “We could divide a tart between us all. Would that be greedy?”
Branwell started to protest and then pressed his lips together.
Under four pairs of hopeful eyes, Maria gave in, with one parting shot. “You are not to stuff your faces, mind.”
Rose thought it was a phrase Maria had heard at home, and that the speaker must be an irritating person.
They walked back along the path with the ponies trailing behind them. Rose tethered the animals in the overgrown garden to crop the grass, and they took the children into the front parlor, where they shed their coats and hats. A bit later, when a plate of tarts and glasses of milk had been served, Rose took it on herself to divert Maria with gentle questions so that the others could devour as many sweets as they dared.
That turned out to be most of them. Tarts slipped off the plate and were passed along with a magician’s sleight of hand. Blissful expressions followed each bite. Emily in particular grew sticky and covered in crumbs. Branwell experimented with pushing a whole tart into his mouth at once. His eyes danced as he chewed with bulging cheeks. Rose was exchanging a look of enjoyment with the duchess when footsteps sounded in the entryway. Maria Bront? started, and when the parlor door opened, she jumped guiltily to her feet.
The duke and Gavin came in, dressed in their riding clothes. Maria sank back into her chair. She didn’t look relieved, however. She glanced at the ravaged plate as if the men’s arrival had roused a sense of their transgression.
“Who is this?” asked Tereford with a smile.
“Some neighbors,” his wife replied. “The Bront?s from Haworth parsonage.” She pointed as she named them. “Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte, Branwell, and Emily.”
“Anne is too little to go out,” said Branwell. He seemed fixated on this fact.
“Is she?”
Gavin was surprised when the duke waded in and sat down amidst the children. On the floor!
“But you are not,” Tereford went on.
“I’m nearly four,” the little boy declared, as if this was a perfectly reasonable age to be paying calls.
“Where are your parents?” asked Gavin. The oldest child flinched, and he regretted his tone. He hadn’t meant anything by it.
“The children have been out riding on their ponies,” said Rose. “They’ve been telling us they love the moor.” She gave Gavin a look that suggested he should understand this sentiment. Well, he did.
“It’s glorious,” exclaimed the smallest girl, flinging out her arms with a surprising wealth of emotion.
Gavin wondered that a child so small knew the word. She had something sticky smeared on her chin. And were those crumbs in her hair? He met young Emily’s eyes and discovered an ardent spirit behind them. “Bront?,” he said. “Your family arrived here recently. I have met your father.” He had called on the new curate, as was polite.
The children all looked at him. They showed a range of expressions, from apprehensive to mulish to…prepared to judge? That didn’t seem possible.
“He is a learned man, I believe,” Gavin added. He’d found the man pompous, but he thought it better not to say so.
“Papa studied at St. John’s College, Cambridge,” said the eldest child. “He has been a school examiner.”
That one was Maria, Gavin recalled. She looked like a miniature schoolmistress herself. The strict kind who did not tolerate levity.
“Quite a scholar then,” said the duke.
Maria nodded solemnly.
“He writes poetry too,” said another of them. Elizabeth, Gavin remembered.
“Does he?” Tereford sat among them as if he was an indulgent uncle rather than a peer of the realm. The man kept on flouting expectations.
Elizabeth folded her hands, sat very straight, and recited.
“The sun shines bright, the morning’s fair,
The gossamers float on the air,
The dew-gems twinkle in the glare,
The spider’s loom
Is closely plied, with artful care,
Even in my room.”
Gavin was not impressed, except by the little girl’s feat of memorization. He might have commented on that accomplishment, but she went on before he was required to give an opinion.
“See how she moves in zigzag line,
And draws along her silken twine,
Too soft for touch, for sight too fine,
Nicely cementing:
And makes her polished drapery shine,
The edge indenting.
Her silken ware is gaily spread,
And now she weaves herself a bed,
Where, hiding all but just her head,
She watching lies
For moths or gnats, entangled spread,
Or buzzing flies.”
Nothing for the flies here, Gavin thought, as he watched the last of what had seemingly been a plate of treacle tarts disappear during this recitation. He tried not to regret the loss, though he was fond of treacle tarts. These children were ethereally slender. They needed the sustenance more than he did.
“You have memorized a good deal of it,” said the duke at the pause.
“I know lots more,” Elizabeth replied. “Papa says learning poetry is good exercise for the mind.”
“And the act of creation emulates God’s work,” said Maria Bront?.
“Emulates, does it?” The duke glanced at his wife. He seemed oddly nonplussed. The duchess was clearly amused.
“Exploring the heights of imagination,” said… Which was it? Charlotte, Gavin recalled, who couldn’t be more than five years old. If that. She must be parroting a phrase she’d heard at home. All of them were, Gavin decided. He thought the new curate must have an unusual household.
“‘Ars longa, vita brevis,’” said Branwell.
“You know Latin?” the duke asked. And why he should be daunted, Gavin did not know.
“Only a little. Papa is teaching me.”
A very strange household, Gavin thought, if the toddlers were spouting ancient tags while the little girls repeated singsong poems. The picture was a bit disturbing.
As if she might have sensed his reaction, Maria stood up. “We should be going,” she said. She gathered her siblings with an admonitory glance. “Thank you very much for your hospitality. And the…” She looked at the empty plate, blinked, glanced at her brother and sisters, and shook her head. Hadn’t they given her any tarts? Gavin wondered.
The other children rose to their feet in a hurried mob.
“I hope you will visit us again,” said the duchess with a smile.
“Do you ever have plum cake?” asked the little boy.
“Branwell!” His mortified eldest sister took his hands, discovered their stickiness, wiped them on a napkin, and pulled him away. They all began putting on the coats and hats and gloves that had been piled on a chair in the corner.
The duke escorted them out. Watching through a window, Gavin saw him laughing as he lifted the smaller children onto their ponies. It didn’t seem the sort of thing a leader of the haut ton would do. He lifted a hand in farewell too, when they waved goodbye. And he kept at it as long as the children did.
“I wonder if I should have sent someone with them?” Tereford asked when he returned to the parlor.
“They seemed self-sufficient,” replied the duchess. “But young.” She turned to Gavin and Rose. “They’re not in any danger riding on the moor?”
“They’re being careful,” Rose replied. “I spoke to Elizabeth about the bogs, and she said they’d been warned to keep away and would do so.”
“Those ponies would hurry them away from danger if they gave them a kick,” said Gavin. “Or on their own if they sensed anything.” Moorland ponies were clever creatures.
“We rode over the moors when we were small,” said Rose.
“We were older than that,” Gavin replied.
“Not than the oldest ones.”
“We didn’t take babies along.”
“I began tagging after my brother when I was four.”
“Your brother was not a good…” Gavin realized that he was arguing with Rose. Again. It just happened. The words came out before he thought, as if they were some script he’d memorized for the stage. But he had promised to resist. They were to pretend to agree. Or at least not to disagree. “Ah, Daniel,” he said. “He’s, uh, still at Oxford, isn’t he? I heard that. Is he doing well?”
Rose blinked. “He doesn’t write often. He is certainly happier there than here.”
“He doesn’t care for this place?” asked the duchess.
Rose looked as if she wished she hadn’t spoken. “He is very scholarly, deep in his books. He and my father…have rather different views.”
Gavin found that he didn’t like to see her so uncomfortable. “As young men and their fathers tend to do,” he said. “Wouldn’t you say, Tereford?”
“Oh yes.” The duke shook his head. “More than sometimes.”
When Rose’s expression eased, Gavin discovered that he appreciated her relief. He didn’t care to see her unsettled by these outlanders, he decided. They had no right to poke their noses into local affairs. “Those were curious children,” he said.
“They were terrifying,” said the duke, which seemed extreme.
The duchess smiled.
“Are they typical of the neighborhood?” Tereford asked.
“Not in the least,” said Gavin. “Our youngsters are more likely to be pelting along the moor tracks waving sticks as sabers and covered in mud.”
“Or lying in ambush behind a crag and jumping out with a great shriek,” said Rose.
Gavin remembered that occasion. His mount had leaped straight up, all four feet leaving the ground. He hadn’t fallen off though. “You screamed like a banshee,” he told her.
“I certainly did.” She looked amused by the memory.
Rose was always rather pretty, Gavin noted, but when she smiled… It made a man wish she would smile more often.
“The oldest, Maria, was unusually assured for her age,” said the duchess.
“Spookily so,” said Gavin.
“Did you think that as well?” The duke looked relieved. “I felt as if I was talking to a schoolmistress. And being marked down for dullness.”
Gavin was unsettled to find they’d shared the same thought. He and this duke had nothing in common.
“You are too harsh,” said Rose.
“Not harsh. Apprehensive.” Tereford grimaced. “I am making a study of the young, since we will soon have one of our own, and more often than not I find myself quaking in my boots.”
Tereford kept being…not what he expected, Gavin thought. He wished the fellow would stop it. It was confusing.
“I suspect Maria’s parents rely on her too much,” said the duchess.
“They said their mother is ill,” replied Rose.
“It must be serious. Perhaps we will call and see if there is anything we can do.”
“That would be kind,” said Rose. “They are new to the neighborhood and have no friends as yet.”
“Not if this illness is contagious,” began the duke. He frowned. “The children looked all right.”
“We will take care, James,” said his wife. “As I have been doing all along.”
“I know.”
The looks they exchanged were full of tenderness. They were less and less what he had expected, Gavin thought. Nothing like it at all, in fact. The duchess was kind. The duke was tolerable. He’d endured no mockery in this house, no sly digs or arrogant dismissals. In fact, even in the brief time he’d been here, Yerndon had begun to seem like a…home. More than his own did, at times, when his mother was on a rampage. The idea made him feel strange. He didn’t know what to do with it. It had to be wrong. So he simply set it aside. “If you visit the Bront?s, you might have to endure more maudlin verses,” he said.
“As long as they are not about spiders,” replied the duchess with a small shiver.
The duke laughed.
He had a warm, free laugh, Gavin thought as the two of them departed to change out of their riding dress. Not the least sarcastic. Tereford might be hiding any amount of ill nature, but Gavin didn’t think so. The villain of their property dispute seemed anything but. Which made matters more awkward rather than less so, he decided. He wasn’t sure just what to do about that.
When he left his bedchamber a bit later, he encountered Rose in the upstairs corridor.
“You did well,” she said.
“Well?”
“Not arguing,” she explained. “I hope it wasn’t too difficult.” She smiled.
Such a lovely smile, Gavin thought. She ought to smile. She ought to have reason to smile. “It was the greatest strain imaginable,” he answered. “I made Herculean efforts.” He relished the spark of amusement in her blue eyes.
“You were going to tell me that Daniel was a poor rider and a worse adventurer, not worth tagging after.”
“How do you know…”
“You’ve said it before,” Rose added. “He was often ill as a child, you know.”
Gavin had heard something about that. He hadn’t paid attention. Why not? “I didn’t mean…”
Rose waved this aside. “Daniel wouldn’t care. He doesn’t pretend to ride well. And he has told me that his scholarly explorations suit him far better than muddy rambles on the moor. He’s quite healthy now too.”
“That’s good.”
She nodded. “And you didn’t lose your temper even once today. As yet.”
“That is the sort of remark that makes me more likely to do so.”
“Consider it retracted.” Rose turned away toward the door of her bedchamber.
He didn’t want her to leave. He wanted… He had no idea. “Why do you never get angry?” Gavin asked her, surprising himself. She started to speak, and he added, “Almost never.”
Rose cocked her head. “I’m not prone to it.”
Gavin knew that he was. He’d been told so all his life. His mother relished this resemblance between them.
“Also, my grandmother once told me something when I was visiting her in Wells. My Naismith grandmother.”
Gavin nodded. He had never met her mother’s mother. If she’d visited, he’d never heard of it.
“I was in a flame about something. I can’t remember now what it was, and she said that she managed her temper by being grateful a thing was not worse.”
“Worse?” asked Gavin.
“If she was splashed by a passing carriage, for example, and angry at the driver, she would be glad that she had not taken one more careless step and been ridden down by the team. Or if a friend was stubborn or heedless, she could be grateful that they did not live in the same house and she didn’t have to endure those moods more often.”
“And that helped?” Gavin asked.
“Once she was grateful, she was less angry,” Rose replied.
“Grateful,” he repeated. This plan seemed unlikely.
“So she said. She had quite a quick temper. But she didn’t often give it free rein.” Rose gazed up at him, her lips a little parted.
He had come closer to her as they talked. She hadn’t moved away, but she was standing almost against the corridor wall. One more step and he could slip his arms around her, press her into the paneling, take those lips for his own.
Rose stared into his eyes. She looked uncertain. Curious? Dubious? Willing?
Gavin’s senses swam. His pulse spiked. Did she feel the same…allure?
She blinked. Reality snapped back into place around Gavin. What was he thinking? What was happening to him? He stepped back. “Er.”
She turned and moved quickly into her bedchamber, closing the door with a snap behind her.