12 #2
Mrs. Rumford stared at her blankly before asking with utmost bewilderment, “The same tragedy?”
His mother nodded sympathetically. “Yes, losing your husbands as you have.”
Understanding lit Mrs. Rumford’s features. “Oh! Yes, we have all lost our husbands. Though I’m not certain any of us would call that event a tragedy.”
A shocked silence fell at that unexpected pronouncement, one that Mrs. Rumford was blissfully unaware of as she chewed on her bread.
“I?.? .? .? see,” his mother managed before smiling bracingly. “It must be quite a large change, moving from the house you shared with your husband to one filled with women.”
“Oh, but I barely lived with my husband. Not above a month, I’d say. After that, I stayed with my mother. And so I am not unused to living in purely female households.”
“Did your husband die so soon after your marriage then?” his mother asked, shocked.
“Oh, no. He lived a good?.? .? .? hmm, I’d say four or five years after our marriage?”
Which, naturally, caused another heavy silence.
This one, however, was obvious enough that Mrs. Rumford finally realized she had said something unusual.
She flushed again, the strawberry blush traveling down her neck, beneath the bodice of her gown.
Something Oliver was trying his damnedest not to notice.
“That is,” Mrs. Rumford stammered, eyes tripping about the room, “he preferred to stay in London.”
“You reside in London now, but did not live there at the time of your marriage?” Oliver found himself asking. Truly, this was the most baffling conversation, and he didn’t have the patience to wait for his mother to ask the right questions.
“No, not at the time.”
“And you say you were living with your mother?”
“Y-yes.”
“Where?”
“Er, Essex?”
“Are you asking me or telling me?”
Her lips gaped like a fish gasping for breath before she answered, eyes wild in her suddenly pale face, “I am telling you, Essex, near Herongate.”
He opened his mouth to continue his questioning, but his mother laid a hand on his arm, halting him in his tracks.
“Oliver,” his mother admonished, “you’re overwhelming her.
My apologies, Mrs. Rumford,” she said to that woman.
“My son was a Bow Street Runner, you know, and at times allows the habit of interrogation to take over.” She laughed lightly.
“Though I cannot complain when it assists me in getting answers out of Verity.”
“Oh.” Mrs. Rumford blinked, looking at his mother and sister as if she had forgotten they were there. As he had, he realized with a start. He’d been so intent on learning more about Mrs. Rumford, he’d quite forgotten where they were. He sat back, silently cursing himself for his impatience.
Mrs. Rumford placed her spoon beside her bowl with shaking fingers.
And then her hands dipped below the edge of the table.
He frowned. Was she worrying at the skin of her wrist again?
He had the ridiculous urge to stand up and stride to her, to take her hands in his so he might prevent her from harming herself.
It was with utmost will he kept his seat.
“I have never been to Essex,” Verity said, seemingly ignorant of the sudden tension in the room as she served herself a piece of roast chicken before passing the platter to Mrs. Rumford. Which, blessedly, required the use of her hands, stopping her from damaging herself further. “Do you miss it?”
“I do,” Mrs. Rumford replied, busying herself with taking a bit of the fowl, seeming to have gained control of herself at the return to normal conversation.
“It’s not Essex itself I miss, however, but my mother.
I have told you she was a botanist.” Verity nodded, and Mrs. Rumford continued as she cut into her meat.
“She had the most wonderful glasshouse where we spent hour upon hour together. Some of the happiest memories I have are of our time tending to her plants.”
“Did you grow up there then?” Verity asked.
“I did. I was born in that house and did not leave it until her death some five years ago.”
She paused, fork and knife suspended as if she were a marionette and someone had forgotten to move the strings, and a shadow of grief crossed her features.
Oliver sucked in a breath at the sight, feeling an echo of the grief in his gut when he thought of his stepfather, and his father before him.
He did not linger often on remembrances of losing them, those men who had shaped his life and built, brick by brick, the morals that had guided him.
But witnessing it in Mrs. Rumford, he felt them wash over him, leaving him shaken.
“I cannot imagine living apart from one’s spouse,” his mother said quietly. A sad smile crossed her lips. “Of course, both of my marriages were love matches. It’s a rarity, I suppose, to have been so blessed twice in one’s lifetime.”
“Or even once, I daresay,” Mrs. Rumford said. She laughed, but it had the flavor of pain to it. “I know I shall never experience it.”
“Never say so!” Verity cried. “How can you think such a thing?”
His mother chuckled. “Forgive my daughter. With my history, she’s become something of a dreamer when it comes to matters of the heart.”
“It’s a wonderful gift you’ve given her,” Mrs. Rumford said. “One should live with hope for good things to happen in life.”
“But you don’t have that hope?” Oliver found himself asking.
She looked at him, and the sadness in her eyes stole the breath from his body. “No, I don’t,” she replied, the matter-of-fact tone of it somehow even sadder than her grief.
His mother laid a hand on Mrs. Rumford’s arm, drawing those painfully hopeless eyes to her, finally releasing Oliver from the spell of them. “Don’t think such things, my dear,” she said. “I’m certain all the good things in life shall come your way. Mark my words.”
For the briefest moment, his mother’s gaze flitted to him. But it was gone before he could figure out what it meant.
“But you’ve hardly eaten a bite while we’ve kept you talking,” she continued, all smiles for Mrs. Rumford. “What a horrible hostess you must think me.”
And just like that, his mother took control of the room and the conversation, filling the rest of the meal with tales of Verity’s antics that had Mrs. Rumford laughing in earnest. Oliver, however, was not so easily led, his mind still quite firmly stuck on Mrs. Rumford’s baffling, sad history—and the grief in her eyes that had touched something he had long thought dead in his heart.