Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
Meeting with Matilda along the New Walk, Tamsin did not tell her closest friend about the locked door. A door she had left locked for a second night, even though she had remained as approachable as ever during the day.
She told Matilda nearly everything else.
It was not a deliberate omission, not precisely.
She simply found that when she reached that portion of the story, the words refused to come.
Telling Matilda she and Roman had disagreed was one thing.
Admitting she had stood in her nightdress with her hand upon a key, hesitating for several seconds before deliberately turning it against her husband, was another.
Some would have likely said it was not her right to prohibit her husband’s access to her. Not that she thought the lock really needed engaging, but it was the principle of the thing.
Wasn’t it?
So she let the story end downstairs in the dining room with her pounding headache.
“He meant to help,” Tamsin affirmed, for what she suspected was the third time.
Matilda pursed her lips and twirled the parasol over her shoulder. “Yes. I believe I understood that the first two times you mentioned it.”
Tamsin looked down at Athena, walking next to her on a loose lead. Behind them about ten paces followed Jones, the groom. Apollo was with Roman, somewhere, but she’d begun taking Athena on walks. She admitted one thing more to her friend. “And…and he was right about Anne.”
Matilda made a small sound.
Tamsin narrowed her eyes. “You needn’t sound quite so pleased about it.”
Her friend grinned. “I said nothing.”
“You made a sound.”
“I breathed!” the widow protested.
“I would describe that as a rather critical breath, then.”
Matilda’s eyes sparkled impishly. She was so much more expressive than her brother. “I have known you for a great many years. You ought to be accustomed to the sound of my breathing by now.”
Tamsin tried not to smile, and failed. It felt good, in all honesty, to share in the amusement. With things strained between herself and Roman the past two days, she’d needed this escape.
Not that things were unpleasant. Roman had been unfailingly courteous when she saw him. So had she.
Courtesy was an extraordinarily poor substitute for the easy companionship, once one had swiftly grown accustomed to the latter.
“She does depend upon me too much,” Tamsin admitted at last. “Anne, I mean.”
“Yes.” Matilda continued twirling the handle of her parasol.
The quickness of that single word made Tamsin frown. “You might have pretended to consider before agreeing.”
“Why would I do that, Tamsin? You already know my opinion.”
“Do I?”
This time, Matilda huffed and stepped off the path toward one of the benches.
“Come and sit for a moment. Enjoy the view of the boats going by on the river. I always do.” Once they were both on the bench, Athena sitting happily at her mistress’s side, her friend took up the conversation again.
“Tamsin, Anne Mayweather has expected you to look after all her problems since we were girls.”
Her stomach twisted somewhat unpleasantly. “No, she has not.”
Matilda turned fully toward her, brows raised high.
Family loyalty meant something here, surely. Tamsin cast about for a more truthful and honest answer which did not feel like a direct criticism of her stepmother. “Well. She has not expected me to take care of all of them.”
Another look, accompanied by a slight flaring of her friend’s nostrils. How did Matilda manage to make that look sophisticated rather than foolish?
“Matilda.” Tamsin crossed her arms, accidentally tugging Athena’s lead. The dog turned her head, too, so both her walking companions were staring at her.
Airily, her friend shrugged her shoulders. “I am merely breathing again.”
“Do stop it, then.”
That made Matilda smirk. “I think it is a rather essential function to continue living, dear friend.”
Tamsin adjusted the dog’s lead again, folding her hands more demurely in her lap. “My stepmother has never been cruel,” she said after a moment.
That brought a different sort of sigh from her friend, one far more long-suffering. Of course. Matilda’s mother was quite similar to Anne Mayweather in a number of ways. “No. That is true.”
“And she loves us. Even though I am her stepdaughter,” Tamsin added, “she has never made that a slight in our household. Not common, I am given to believe, with stepmothers.”
“I know.” Matilda closed her parasol and laid it across her lap, her gaze drifting to the boats on the river.
“She simply becomes…overwhelmed.” Tamsin looked up at the trees lining the path, their leaves now entirely yellow and waiting to fall as the weather grew cooler.
“Yes. Ten children and a household to run would be rather overwhelming. If she ever had attempted to manage ten children. If she’d ever had ten actual children to care for—your brothers were at school by the time she married your father,” her friend pointed out.
They were prescient points, and not ones Tamsin wanted to consider. “And Father—” And there she stopped.
Her father had never been cruel either. He had never ordered her to take responsibility for her siblings.
He had never sat her down and declared that the management of Sycamore Lodge belonged to her.
He simply failed to notice when it did. Or…
perhaps he had noticed and found the arrangement satisfactory.
That possibility was considerably less comfortable.
“Someone had to do things.” Tamsin said it so quietly she wasn’t even certain she had spoken the thought aloud. Matilda’s expression changed. “Are you going to tell me what you are thinking?”
“Hmm?” Matilda’s blue eyes widened and she blinked innocently at Tamsin. “Me? Darling, I was not thinking anything. Barely breathing!”
“I believe you were.” Tamsin fought the desire to smile. “I think you wanted to say something, too.”
Pressing a hand to her heart, Matilda continued to act of guilelessness. “But I did not say anything? I did not even breathe in an objectionable way.”
“You were thinking something.”
Her friend turned back to the water. “I have been known to think things with alarming regularity.”
Fully exasperated, yet still somehow amused, Tamsin leaned into her friend’s shoulder a touch.
“Tilly. Tell me. Please.” She had not called her childhood friend that shortened version of her name in years.
Matilda had never forbidden it, exactly, but everyone had stopped using it when she married—except for her late husband.
At last, Matilda’s expression softened. She leaned back against Tamsin as she relented. “I was only wondering who decided that the someone had to be you.”
Tamsin opened her mouth to explain, but nothing immediately presented itself. “That is not fair.” Whether she meant the question or the situation itself, she could not immediately decide. She did not need to.
“No,” Matilda said simply. “It is not.”
The easy concession robbed Tamsin of any desire to make her defense on that point. Instead she looked down at her lace gloves, adjusted the wrist unnecessarily, then sighed. “I wanted to go.”
They were close enough friends that Matilda followed the path her thoughts had taken. “To Sycamore Lodge?”
“Yes. More importantly, to Henry.”
Matilda nodded, fully accepting the explanation without question. That was one of the things Tamsin loved best about her. Her friend knew and understood so much.
“I think that is what Roman did not understand.” Tamsin tried to arrange the thought properly before speaking it. “Anne expected me to come because she did not know what else to do, and I am the one she is used to turning to when that occurs. Roman saw that immediately.”
“And now?”
“Now I see it too.” She hesitated. “But if Henry could have written to ask for me, I believe he would have done so. Roman still should have consulted me instead of making the decision for me. Henry is not…” She frowned. “He is not a household matter to be settled.”
“No.” Matilda patted her hands. “I know. He is your brother, and he needed you.”
“I like that he needed me.” There was the uncomfortable part. Tamsin looked down at her hands.
A soft scoff escaped the woman beside her. “Why do you say that like a penitent making terrible confession?”
“It feels like a confession, given the circumstances.”
“Really? Why?” Matilda bent at the waist, peering up past the edge of Tamsin’s bonnet to better see her face. “Are you never to be needed again by your siblings?”
“No,” she conceded. “But this feels different. Roman may be right. Perhaps I have spent so long being needed by all of them, I do not know how not to be.” Her nose wrinkled. That sounded convoluted.
Another pat on her gloved hands from Matilda. “Perhaps. Perhaps not.”
Tamsin gave her friend an irritated look. “Really, Matilda. You are terrible at reassurance.”
“I thought you came to me for honesty.”
“While that has previously been the case, today I have reconsidered.”
Matilda laughed outright at that. “Very well. Let us mix truth and reassurance together.” She took her closed parasol and tapped the tip of it on Tamsin’s knee. “You can like being needed by Henry, and still dislike your family acting like everything concerning Henry is your responsibility.”
That was an unexpected conclusion. Tamsin leaned more heavily against the back of the bench, scrutinizing her friend. “I am not certain I know how to tell the difference.”
“Between being needed and being used?”
The word made Tamsin flinch. “Anne does not use me.”
“If you say so.”
Goodness, their conversation was proving frustrating today. “Oh, stop. Do not agree like that!”
“How would you prefer I agree?”
“Convincingly.”
A giggle flew from her friend’s lips, and a matron walking along the path sent a glower in their direction. Athena huffed at the matron, though the woman was unlikely to have heard it.