Chapter 6
In the cozy hush of the local inn, old timers nursed their ales by the fire, voices low as they swapped tales of the dowager’s fiery youth.
fencing with dashing Frenchmen and outwitting suitors at every turn.
They wondered if her son might ever shake off his brooding ways and find a match to tame his solitary heart.
By the time Verity had taken in her breakfast, the snow was already shifting in the eaves. She warmed her hands at the hearth for a few minutes, then made her way to the dowager’s rooms.
Lady Blackfen’s rooms were as warm and perfumed as Verity recalled. The countess was already at her worktable, spectacles perched upon the very tip of her nose, a nest of colored silks around her.
“My lady,” Verity said, dropping a neat curtsy, “good morning. I hope you slept well.”
Lady Blackfen raised her head and considered Verity over the rims of her spectacles. “I slept as the dead do, Miss Hale, without complaint and with no use for the clock. Now, are you familiar with this? My husband used to say only busy hands keep idle thoughts from crawling around. Please join me.”
Verity sat on the settee, tucking her skirt beneath her, and accepted the tambour frame the dowager countess offered her. “Yes, it has always helped me to keep my mind occupied, my lady. If I am not sewing, I am reading or walking or …”
“Or dreaming,” the dowager finished with a sly smile. “That was my cure, too. Tell me, do you know how to thread a needle with one hand while uncorking a bottle with the other?”
Verity’s lips twitched. “I do not believe I have mastered it yet, my lady.”
Lady Blackfen laughed, the sound rich and hoarse.
“I can show you, if you like. My late husband swore I could hold a conversation, a glass, and a needle all at once, and never miss a stitch. He was right. I mended all his shirts until the day he died, and every one of them with a glass of wine close by. Did you ever know such a thing, Miss Hale? A peeress who loved a man so well she preserved his very wardrobe?”
Verity had not, but she let herself smile. “It sounds like devotion, my lady.”
“It was more a defense against boredom. He was a great bore, you know.” The old woman angled her head, eyes sparkling.
“I suppose I should not say it, but I never did have the knack for discretion. Rowan Northwood was the handsomest, most upright, most righteous man. Also the dullest. His passion was ledgers. His soul craved sermons. He kissed like a curate and argued like a bishop, but oh, how he adored me.”
She snapped a thread and selected a new color, one bolder than the pattern required. “He was my opposite in all ways. Where he ran to strict order, I ran to mischief. Where he preferred the earth, I preferred the fire. Still, it was a good marriage. We were loyal.”
“I never expected I would marry him,” the dowager went on. “Not because I did not love him. But because I had expected, for almost all of my younger years, that I was to marry a Frenchman named Bastien, who had taught me to fence and to gamble and to say yes when I ought to say no.”
“Was he … very handsome?” Verity asked, drawn in by the story.
“Beautiful as Lucifer and twice as dangerous.” Lady Blackfen reached for her tea and sipped.
“He died, of course. I wore black for Bastien until I was forbidden it. Then I wore red instead, and that was when the world knew I could not be broken.” She fixed Verity with a look.
“Do you know why I tell you all this, Miss Hale?”
Verity shook her head.
“Because I see something of myself in you. Not the wildness, no. But you have survived something, and it has left a mark. I can tell. You think you hide it, but women of a certain experience can spot such things.”
“Oh.” Verity did not know what else to say to that. She concentrated on her stitches and willed herself not to show any emotion.
The embroidery went on, the only noises the occasional click of scissors and the pop of the fire. Verity let the rhythm settle her, grateful for the excuse to keep her head bent and her eyes occupied. Working with quick practiced fingers, she let the steady rhythm of silk through linen calm her.
“You were a beauty, my lady,” she ventured at last, nodding at the portrait above the hearth of Lady Honoria Northwood, tall and unbowed, her raven hair spilling in glossy curls beneath a pearl ribbon.
Her eyes, bright with mischief, stared straight out. A gown of ivory silk clung to her youthful figure, pearls at her throat gleaming against flawless skin, while one hand toyed with a half-opened fan and the other rested on a marble pedestal.
Behind her, storm clouds gathered over Blackfen’s towers, a painter’s hint of the tempests to come.
Even in oils she looked ready to laugh, to gamble, to fence with a forbidden Frenchman.
Verity could not look away from the defiant tilt of that painted chin and the secret smile that said, plainly, I shall live on my own terms.
“‘Were,’” Lady Blackfen mocked, putting a hand to her breast in pantomimed offense. “Do you suggest I am not so now?”
Verity blushed. “No, indeed, my lady. Only that the portrait?—”
The dowager relented, laughing again. “Oh, Miss Hale. I have always been a beauty, and always will be, for so long as I say so. Never let a man or a mirror decide that for you.” She glanced up at the painted face. “That was painted the week I was married.”
Verity thought about the past, the countess’s not her own, and wondered if she would ever live large enough to have such stories to tell when she was an old woman.
“My husband loved this castle,” the countess said after a while, her tone softer, “and he loved his family, including myself and our son, even more. He was not a demonstrative man, but he cherished Lucien. Lucien is a Northwood in every bone. All the seriousness of his father, but with a streak of iron I never possessed.”
Verity looked up, sensing the old woman’s gaze.
“He keeps the world at a distance,” Lady Blackfen said, “but it is only to protect it. His father did the same. You must understand that Lucien is a good man. When he shows reticence or frightens people, it is not because he wishes to. It is only because he has too much in him to let out all at once.”
Verity could not imagine Lord Blackfen frightening anyone, least of all herself. So she said, “I confess, my lady, I have never thought of Lord Blackfen as frightening. Only I do find myself wishing he smiled more often.”
Lady Blackfen gave a soft, delighted cackle.
“My dear girl, if you wait for Lucien to smile of his own accord, we shall all be in our graves before it happens. He keeps his joy locked up tighter than anyone I have ever seen.” She leaned forward, eyes suddenly sharp beneath the lace cap.
“Pour yourself some tea, child. There is an extra cup on the tray. The one with the chipped rose. My husband hated that chip, said it ruined the set. So I kept it because it annoyed him.”
Verity obeyed, lifting the delicate porcelain with care.
“Now,” Lady Blackfen said, and with a regal gesture, she raised her cup in a toast. “To good men, even the dead ones, and to the women who made or make their lives bearable.”
Verity raised her own cup. “To both.”
Lady Blackfen’s pleasure in the needlework soon gave way to what Verity could only call Lady Blackfen’s period of prodding.
The tea was half-cooled when the dowager set down her cup and, peering over her spectacles, remarked, “You have good hands for sewing, but it is your hips that are your standout trait, Miss Hale. I do not wish to be indelicate, but I am a great believer in the honesty of bones. You have excellent bones.”
Verity, caught off guard, glanced up from her embroidery hoop. “My lady?”
“Hips, girl. You are made to bear children. My own mother told me she could tell at birth which of her daughters would breed true and which would wither on the vine.” She leaned in, voice dropping. “You do not strike me as the withering sort.”
Verity blushed scarlet. “I have not given the matter much thought,” she said, though this was a boldfaced lie.
She had woolgathered more than once in recent days, wondering if her secret would deny her every chance at a family, if she would end up a spinster, or worse, if she might one day disappoint some husband.
“You do not have to start now, but you do have to get on the path to it now, or you will have some difficulty later on,” Lady Blackfen advised.
She seemed to delight in Verity’s discomfort.
“I tell my son this, but he seems to have no interest in family. No interest in anything but his damn dogs and his duty to the estate. I think he is determined to be the last Northwood to walk these halls, though he has never said it aloud.”
Verity forced her attention back to the embroidering. “He seems very devoted to you, my lady. And to the castle.”
The dowager sniffed. “He is a good boy, but he is a fool about some things. He seems determined not to be wed, but perhaps the best pair of childbearing hips in the county can do something about it.”
“My lady—” Verity began, only to be interrupted.
“Do not protest,” Lady Blackfen said, waggling her finger. “You are made for children, that much is obvious. And I know his animal spirits are going to be hard to resist with such a fertile young woman in residence.”
Verity nearly jabbed herself with the needle.
The memory of Lord Blackfen’s hands, the great heat of his body, came to her unbidden.
He had worn only a coat, not even a shirt, when she found him in the woods.
The greatcoat had hung open at the neck, and when she reached to touch him she had touched bare skin that was hotter than that of a fever.
It had been impossible, and yet she had felt it, the heat that leapt under his flesh.