Chapter 11 #2
“If Wealtha marries, her husband’s family should add to that total. If she remains unwed, she will have a hundred pounds per annum. With free room and board at the dower house, and her money invested in the cent-per-cents, she will be an enviably comfortable maiden lady.”
Mabel rose, though Richard did not step back.
“She won’t be comfortable,” he said. “She’s like me before I made something of myself. Always in a pout, never satisfied. I don’t much like what I know of my sister.”
“But you will see her taken care of anyway.” Sweet words were precious, while Richard’s basic decency was irresistible.
“Of course I will look after her. Wealtha is not to blame for her circumstances. With any luck, she will soon be smitten by some handsome swain, and her discontent will no longer be ours to manage.”
Richard assumed the swain would be similarly enamored. “She will beg you to take her to London when you go.”
“In the first place, she might have a long wait, and in the second, you have warned me against visiting her upon Town. I heed your warnings, Amabel.”
Amabel. She was growing to like her own name again, but Orla would not at all approve of his plan to linger in Yorkshire. “Let’s be off, my lord. If you’d hand me my bonnet, please?”
He did not hand her the bonnet. He placed it carefully on her head, tied the ribbons in a bow, kissed her cheek lingeringly, and draped her cloak about her shoulders. Small courtesies, a passing flirtation, and all of it more precious than he could know.
Wealtha might not ever have her heart’s desire, but in each gesture of consideration and affection, Richard gave Mabel pieces of a dream she’d put aside once and for all years ago.
She was determined to have what parts of that dream she could, for whatever time was allotted, and to blazes with Orla, Wealtha, nanny goats, and wills.
To blazes with old regrets too.
“Thy mother were a beauty,” Granny Wexler said, shelling peas into a bowl with the expertise of long practice. Split the pod, push out the peas, discard the husk for the delectation of the livestock. “She were not a delicate, refined beauty. A strong country lass, with such a smile.”
Richard had the honor of sharing Granny’s porch on a fine spring morning. Chickens went about decimating the bug population in the front yard, and a fawn-colored nanny goat with her twin offspring snacked on the weeds at the base of the low stone wall.
Amabel would say the yard needed some flowers. Richard needed answers.
“Why do you suppose a young woman regarded as a beauty and reasonably well dowered settled for a man nearly twice her age?”
Granny paused in her shelling. “Thou makest Abernathy Blackstock seem a dodderer. He was vigorous until the end and a fine figure of a man. He would have been a few years older than thou, sir, when he took thy dam to wife. I am told thou hast purchased some goats whilst tarrying yesterday in York.”
“A dozen nannies and two billy goats. One for meat, one for dairy. You are welcome to borrow either.”
She resumed her shelling. “Dairy for me. Enough dairy and eggs, and I needn’t cook much meat. Bathsheba!”
The nanny goat looked up.
Granny upended the bowl of pea husks over the porch railing. The nanny came to investigate, her offspring gamboling after her. The morning was lovely, the sunshine benevolent without bringing oppressive heat, and Granny’s whitewashed stone cottage was everywhere surrounded by verdure.
“If I were seventeen,” Richard said, “and a belle of the parish, I’d look closer to my own age for a husband.
” The difference in ages between Marie and Abernathy was the only wedge Richard had so far found that might explain his mother’s flight to London.
“A man who has been a bachelor into his thirties might be set in his ways beyond what a young bride seeks to contend with.”
“Thou hast seen nigh thirty year, or soon will. Are thou as rigid as all that, young man?”
“I can be very stubborn.” Tenacious was the more accurate term. “That quality has served me well in business and in Society, and thus I might mistake it for an asset in marriage.” Or in courtship.
“Stubbornness is in the nature of every soul born and bred in Yorkshire. We must be stubborn, else we would never outlast the winters.”
The nanny started on the pea husks, occasionally regarding Richard with the peculiar goat eyes that were at once sagacious and diabolical. All the while, her mouth moved in a sideways chewing action until the pea husks were but a memory.
“Was my mother stubborn?”
“Young people are uniformly stubborn. Thy dam were restless, and if thou seeketh more of an explanation than that for her odd behavior, I can give thee none. Thou must ask Mrs. Fielding. If her own sister cannot explain thy mother’s choices to thee, nobody can.”
They could. They simply refused to. Granny herself knew more than she was telling.
Though she appeared to be right out of a benign Quaker storybook—small, white-haired, blue-eyed, and busy—she was also having trouble meeting Richard’s gaze, and she’d rather talk about goats than what had to be the parish’s worst scandal in living memory.
“Thou must not dwell upon the past, young man. Time enough for that when thou hast lived thy three score and ten.”
As Granny had, and yet, she was still unwilling to consider the past for even a quarter hour.
“I loved my mother,” Richard said. “She could have tossed me into a foundling home. Could have deposited me in the care of my paternal relations from infancy. Could have abandoned me on the steps of any London church. She instead trod a very difficult path to raise me herself. That is not the behavior of a foolish, restless young woman.”
“A mother has a duty, as all would agree. When might thy billy goat come calling on my Bathsheba?”
“A week after he arrives from York.” Richard rose lest he upend the bowl of peas into the garden. “What aren’t you telling me about my mother?”
“Much. She had a fine singing voice, stitched a very pretty sampler, and was kindhearted to her younger sister. Thou knowest much else about thine own mother. About the past, I can tell thee little. In all charity, I advise thee to master thy curiosity, lest thine own happiness suffer needlessly.”
“I will bid you good day, then. Should your recollections of my mother return in any detail, particularly as regards an explanation for her marriage and her flight to Mayfair, please do let me know.”
For a moment, Granny’s old eyes held what might have been regret or pity, then she resumed shelling her peas. “Look to the future, young sir, and send along thy billy goat as soon as may be.”
Richard touched a finger to his hat brim and thumped down the porch steps. The nanny goat, her twins, and Granny all watched his departure with similarly inscrutable expressions.
He was still fuming when he cantered Baldur up the Glen’s drive, though his spirits lightened considerably when he saw Amabel sitting in the atrium with a wicker basket at her feet and a wide straw hat on the bench beside her.
“Amabel, please tell me we’re to have a picnic,” he said, passing his hat and spurs to Kepler. “My morning has been a complete loss, and I am abruptly famished.”
She closed the book in her lap and tucked it into the hamper. How could he have ever thought her plain or severe or anything but the epitome of feminine perfection? She greeted him with a soft smile and rose.
“I am taking you prisoner for the next little while. You are not to closet yourself with ledgers, correspondence, or reports. The day is beautiful, and I need to put yesterday’s ordeal in the shops behind me.”
“Then I am your man,” Richard said, feeling foolish and lucky. “Kepler, my hat, please. And your lips are sealed.”
“I have seen neither you nor Miss Mabel.” He dusted the brim of Richard’s hat with his fingers and passed it back. “Neither have I been apprised of your plans, though the orchard is lovely this time of year.”
Amabel offered Richard her hand. “So it is. Good suggestion, Kepler. I am especially not enjoying the orchard with his lordship if Orla or Wealtha should inquire.”
Richard drew her to her feet and resisted the urge to kiss her cheek. “The same for Mr. St. Didier, Kepler. Miss Amabel and I are simply not at home.”
“One understands, my lord, miss. Enjoy that outing you are not taking to the orchard.” He departed on silent feet, though Richard would have sworn the old fellow’s eyes were twinkling.