Chapter Two #2
She drew a fresh sheet towards her, dipped her pen, and resolved with great firmness to think no more about it.
She thought of very little else for the remainder of the morning.
***
In the afternoon, her duties done and the light still good, Clara went out walking, because the house had grown too small for the size of her own thoughts and the moor was the largest thing she had ever seen.
It was a stark country and a beautiful one, all rolling heather and grey outcrops of stone, with sheep scattered like dropped pearls across the distances and a sky so vast it seemed to press the breath gently out of her.
She walked until the manor was a grey shape behind her, and then she found a low drystone wall warmed by the thin sun, and she sat down upon it, and at last she let herself feel what she had been holding off since the carriage first turned in at the gates.
She did not weep loudly. She had never been a loud griever.
She only sat with her hands folded in her lap and let the tears come and go as they would, and she thought of her mother saying you are part of something vast, and beautiful, and she looked up at the great pale daytime sky where the stars still hung, unseen but not absent, and she let herself believe it for a little while, because believing it was easier out here than it was within four walls.
“I do beg your pardon. I had no notion anyone was about.”
She turned, hastily wiping her cheek, to find a gentleman halted a few paces off, his hat already in his hand, every line of him suggesting genuine dismay at having intruded.
“I fear I have startled you,” he said. “Forgive me.”
He was perhaps thirty, of middling height, with warm brown hair and an open, ruddy, good-humoured face that looked as though it smiled a great deal more often than it did anything else.
“Edward,” he added, with a small bow. “Lord Hale, strictly speaking, though I beg you will not stand on ceremony. I am from Hale Court, the next estate but one, and the barony along with it.”
Then, as if realising that this did not quite account for his presence, he added, “His Grace and I are old friends. Or as old as friendship may be with a man who discourages the habit. That is how I came to hear of you, I confess. And you, I think, must be the new companion my friend’s mother has taken on. ”
“Forgive me,” he added. “News travels in these parts faster than the post, and there is precious little of it, so we make a great feast of what there is.”
His smile broadened, without malice.
“You need not own to having been crying, Miss—?”
“Ellsworth.” She found, to her own surprise, that she was nearly smiling back. “Clara Ellsworth. And I shan’t own to it, my lord, since you are kind enough not to press me.”
“There, we shall be friends, then, for I cannot abide a person who presses.” He settled himself companionably upon the far end of the wall, at a proper distance, and looked out over the moor as if to spare her the discomfort of being looked at.
“It is a melancholy sort of grandeur, is it not? I find it suits some moods admirably and others not at all. How do you find Farenwoode, Miss Ellsworth? Speak honestly. I am the soul of discretion, whatever you may have heard.”
“I find it very large,” Clara said, “and very cold, and very beautiful, in roughly equal measure.” She hesitated, then ventured, because there was something in his easy warmth that drew honesty out of her, “And I confess I have not yet learned how I am to fit inside it.”
“Ah.” His face softened. “No. Well. It is not, perhaps, a house that goes out of its way to make a person feel they belong.” He turned his hat in his hands.
“I have known it a great many years. Cedric, His Grace, and I were at Oxford together, you understand. There was no merrier fellow in the whole university, whatever you may think to look at him now.”
“I have not had the honour of looking at him at all,” Clara said, which was a lie, and a small flush of shame went through her at how easily it came. To cover it, she added, truthfully, “I am told he keeps to himself.”
“He keeps to himself the way a man keeps to a sickbed.” Edward’s voice lost its lightness; the worry beneath it showed through plainly.
“His wife died, you will have heard, four years past, and their child with her. He has not been the same man since. He has shut every door he owns and dared the world to knock, and the trouble of it is that I am very near the last fool still knocking.”
He caught himself, and gave a short, rueful laugh.
“Forgive me. I have no business unburdening myself to a lady I met three minutes ago over a stone wall. It is only…” He looked at her, and something thoughtful came into his pleasant face.
“It is only that I have sometimes wondered whether what he wants is not gentleness, of which everyone offers him a surfeit, but someone who will simply speak to him as though he were an ordinary man, and not a tragedy with a title. Someone who does not tiptoe.”
“That seems a great deal to ask of any one person,” Clara said softly.
“It does, rather.” He smiled again, the cloud passing. “Pay me no mind, Miss Ellsworth. I am forever arranging the happiness of people who have not asked me to, and—”
He stopped, his head turning. Across the moor, faint at first and then unmistakable, came the sound of hoofbeats, the steady drumming of a horse ridden hard and well.
Clara turned with him and saw, breaking over the crest of the rise against the wide pale sky, a rider all in dark upon a great black horse, coming on at speed, straight towards them.