Chapter 8
“Iam procrastinating,” Richard said as he and Amabel strolled the path around the upper mill pond. The mill itself was a quarter mile downstream, with a second pond below the wheel. All well maintained, though in spring, the mill and its surrounds were deserted.
“I should be in the library,” Richard went on, “replying to a letter from my brother.” Bernard was enthralled with his new wife, enthralled with the joys of fatherhood, and just generally—touchingly—enthralled. How did one reply to that?
“You have much to see to,” Amabel said. “Don’t begrudge yourself a little fresh air at the end of the day.
I thought we were all keeping up fairly well with the estate business, but you put us to the blush.
We should have been seeding more clover, selling our extra eggs in York, and hiring a wheelwright before planting, plowing, and harvest.”
She was the same Amabel he’d been introduced to a tired lifetime ago, but in the evening light, her hair had highlights of copper and gold, and her stride lacked the purposeful march she adopted at earlier hours.
“None of those adjustments were urgent,” Richard said as they approached a plank bench that looked out over the pond. “Might we sit?” Anything to put off the evening’s library chores and anything to spend another quarter hour with a woman whom Richard was coming to esteem as much as he liked.
“Of course we can sit a moment. I love to watch the dragonflies. Fairies should fly as nimbly.”
“Perhaps they do.” Richard offered his hand as a polite gesture. He wanted to keep hold of her hand when she’d settled on the bench, though.
Too much Yorkshire sunshine and fresh air. Too short a leap from liking and esteem to desire. He took the place beside her and blamed the fresh air for the lack of a foot of space between them.
“I am also putting off my trip into York,” Richard said. “Please scold me for being a coward.”
“You are not a coward.”
“Lazy, then.”
“Not on your most indolent day could you be called lazy, sir. Why have you delayed the meeting in York?”
Dreaded it, more like. “The ledgers are off.”
“The ledgers the solicitors sent out from York?”
“The very ledgers I sent Kepler into York to retrieve, without notice or explanation to the solicitors. The household allowance you’ve been managing on has been overstated, for example. The sum remitted to you is less than the sum recorded in the accounts.”
By half. Not tuppence here or there, not a few pounds each quarter. Half.
“I knew it. Scoundrels, the lot of them.”
“I can respect a competent scoundrel, but to make free with a sum that is so easily investigated suggests these scoundrels are the dull-witted variety.”
The evening was lovely to the point of melancholy, as only a mild spring evening could be. The quiet around the pond was the profound peace of the countryside as winter’s deprivations were cast off for the abundance and optimism of the new growing season.
A calf bawled in the distance for its mama, the birds twittered, and a quiet splash suggested a frog taking to the water.
I could love this place. Wilder than Hampshire and more distant from London, moodier than northern Portugal or sunny Madeira. The views were not merely pretty, they were striking.
Amabel smoothed a hand over her practical brown skirts. “The solicitors hoped you’d never learn of your inheritance, if you even existed. Orla had never met you, Marie had mentioned you in only one or two letters, and Marie was no longer extant. I gather the lawyers did not look very hard for you.”
“I changed my name, and neither my original nor my new name had anything to do with my maternal origins. You are doubtless correct that the solicitors presumed I was dead or had emigrated to unknown parts. They have been both lazy and greedy. Still, one does not confront malefactors without a battle plan and all the evidence.”
“How did Kepler get the books?”
“That part was easy. I told him to present my letter to the head clerk, express a need for haste, and explain that the solicitors were expecting the request and should have all the books in order. The ledgers were handed over without a qualm.”
“And you’ve been studying them ever since.”
“Intermittently.” Mostly, Richard had been spending his evenings in the library, trying to grasp that every volume on the shelves was his and wondering which of them Amabel had read and which she had read and enjoyed.
“More procrastination?”
“Yes. I also put off calling on Mr. Whidman, and now he’s off to Carlisle to spoil his first great-grandson.”
“What of Granny Wexler?”
“A daughter’s lying-in drew her to Alnwick.” She’d return soon, though. So would Whidman.
Amabel patted his knee. “You have been diligent about what matters to you. Be patient, and while you wait for the elders to come home, nip into York. The solicitors have likely packed up, bag and baggage, because they fear for their liberty.”
“Embezzling could see them hanged. I don’t want that on my conscience. The estate has managed adequately, thanks to your good offices. Through St. Didier’s efforts, I have been located and am enjoying my inheritance.”
And that was a surprise. Despite the frustration of unanswered questions about the past, Richard was enjoying the challenge of taking an estate in hand.
He enjoyed as well discussing any and every aspect of that process with Amabel.
“St. Didier was actually my idea,” she said.
“Last year, the Lorne barony—fifteen miles to the northwest—was inherited by a younger son, and St. Didier had something to do with encouraging the heir to take up the reins. Our vicar at St. Bevan’s passed along some details, because he knew the man I presume to be your half-brother.
I discussed the matter with Orla, who eventually agreed with me.
Wealtha was hoping we’d have you declared dead instead. ”
“In the family tradition, no doubt, leaving her to inherit.” Possibly. She was arguably illegitimate, though, which presented legal complications the solicitors would have delighted in exploiting.
Such a beautiful evening and such a mundane, tiresome topic.
The urge to reach for Amabel’s hand was nigh overpowering.
She had kept the Glen together. Every tenant referred to Miss Mabel’s suggestions with respect.
Every gardener mentioned her designs with approval.
The dairymaids solemnly reported that if not for Miss Mabel insisting on some heifers freshening in autumn, the winter would be devoid of butter and cream.
No worse fate could befall a Yorkshire household, and so forth.
“Wealtha might have inherited,” Amabel said. “I am relieved she did not. She has no head for numbers, and she could have been charmed by a fortune hunter if she’d brought a prize like the Glen to the altar.”
“Were you charmed by a fortune hunter?” The question had been bothering Richard for days, though he’d not planned to ask it, ever. Something about that long-ago London Season had left a lasting mark on Amabel’s heart, probably something wearing breeches and a winsome smile.
“Orla says you are too much occupied by the past,” Amabel replied quietly.
“She has known much loss and disappointment in life. No children of her own, a husband who did not provide as well as she’d hoped, widowhood with me on her hands, Wealtha all but thrust upon her, and now she’s ill.
When you bring up the topic of her disgraced sister, she recoils. One’s past should be private.”
Richard did not want Amabel recoiling from him.
“Aunt Orla has made it quite plain that I am not to pry. I grasp the futility of even trying to get answers from her, but I do not understand why she denies me what she alone could give. My own past is being kept private from me. I want to understand what drove my mother to view scandal as preferable to a solid marriage.”
“You want answers, and that’s understandable, while Orla wants peace. I comprehend her desire and share it. My time in London was brief, but it taught me that I am much better off dwelling in rustic obscurity. I have learned to be not merely content, but happy with my lot.”
“I envy you that.” Though her happiness was a carefully constructed edifice when it should have had something of nature’s exuberance about it, not that Richard was any expert on varieties of joy.
She nudged him with an elbow. “You have chosen a similar path, my lord. You might well have done as so many fashionable young fellows do and racketed about London from allowance to allowance, living beyond your means, sustaining yourself on buffets and Venetian breakfasts while eluding the creditors and bamboozling the matchmakers. Your paternal connections are ducal, and you’d have been tolerated.
You instead made something of yourself.”
She had been to London, and she’d paid attention to the details of the spectacle.
“I could have been that bachelor invited to make up numbers, the fourth at whist. The young man who was never obviously inebriated and seldom sober. His Grace of Chanderton would not have let me starve, and I was determined to take out my resentments on the world. Fate intervened when a friend pointed out that in my profligacy, I offered a credible imitation of my own spoiled, heedless father, minus the courtesy title and personal fortune.”
“Ouch.”
“I licked my wounds all the way to Portugal, and my friend helped get my business ventures off on sound footing. She’s Scottish and has an instinct for sound commerce.” She had also recently acquired better luck with husbands, if Bernard’s letters were to be believed.
“You took business advice from a woman?”
“Smartest decision I ever made, and that friend is now married to my half-brother.” Richard considered circling back to Amabel’s unfortunate experiences in Mayfair but dissuaded himself. The topic upset her. “What should I do with the solicitors?”
“You are asking me?”