CHAPTER I #2
It was the teasing note in his voice that finally jolted her out of her shock. Hetty stepped forward to meet him, hands instinctively stretching out for his, as if touching him would serve as the final proof she needed.
Arthur seized both her hands in his own and squeezed them. ‘How are you? You look just the—’
He was beaming as he looked at her and—
It was only a moment. The smallest, most tiny moment, and yet to Hetty it was life-altering. For Arthur, looking Hetty full in the face for the first time, appeared to start, brows flying up. ‘You look well!’ Then, a correction: ‘Very well!’
‘Are you so surprised?’ she said in a passable imitation of her usual manner. ‘Did you expect me to look haggard?’
He cast a swift glance over her. It was the kind of look she had seen him give a thousand times before. Only not to her. Never before to her.
‘No, I just – It is just – your hair has grown.’ For a moment, Arthur looked a shade unnerved.
Hetty raised a self-conscious hand up to her curls. ‘Hair does tend to …’
‘Is it not the finest surprise?’ Lady Allerton appeared at the top of the stairs, beaming. ‘Come, we are in the drawing room – let us be comfortable.’
She beckoned them, and they hastened directly upstairs, not pausing to change their dress, for nobody wished to waste a moment.
The Allertons fell into the drawing room, talking and laughing and speaking over one another, where they only had to wait a moment before their butler Dawson appeared, bearing a pot of tea, plates of fruit and slices of still-warm plum cake.
‘I can hardly believe it,’ Lady Allerton was saying, gazing at her eldest son as if afraid to lose sight of him for a moment more. ‘To have you here, with us again – is it done, then? You are sold out?’
‘Furloughed,’ Arthur corrected. ‘Though only to expedite my return: selling out is certainly my intention.’
Lady Allerton heaved a relieved sigh.
‘Not dressed quite in the current style, of course,’ Timothy added, looking his brother over critically, ‘but I think it will pass, given the circumstances.’
‘Thank you,’ Arthur said gravely. He cast Hetty a sidelong, laughing glance that had her dimpling in response.
‘I shall give you the name of my tailor,’ Timothy offered. ‘If I’d known you were returning today, I could have made you an appointment.’
‘I can only apologise for my lack of forewarning – to you too, Hetty, for I so rudely left your last letter unanswered. I did not yet know if I was going to be able to leave early, and I did not wish to give any false hope.’
‘Do I not deserve an apology, too?’ Trixie demanded. ‘You might have warned me.’
‘And perhaps I might have,’ Arthur said, ‘if I had received more a single billet since I left – and in such a scrawl that your governess ought to be horrified.’
‘I don’t have a governess any more.’ Trixie raised her chin. ‘Hetty and I are both out now, and I am all the rage.’
‘Trixie! You mustn’t say such things.’
‘But it is true, Mama.’
Arthur directed a grimace towards his mother. ‘How have you survived?’
Lady Allerton bestowed a warm smile on them both. ‘Hetty gives me no cause to worry, of course – and Trixie has in truth been remarkably well behaved!’
Hetty took a sip of tea to hide her smile.
Lady Allerton could not know how many of Trixie’s worst starts she had nipped in the bud.
Only last week, it had taken her an hour to convince Trixie that a dress of gauze worn over a dampened and transparent petticoat would scarcely advance her in the good graces of those august members of the ton whose invitations were so essential to a young lady’s success.
‘Very good,’ Arthur said. ‘It seems you have no need of me at all.’
‘I wouldn’t say that.’ Lady Allerton reached for Arthur’s hands again, pressing them as if to reassure herself of his presence.
‘We have missed you,’ Trixie admitted.
Timothy nodded his head. ‘Devilishly!’
Arthur looked enquiringly to Hetty, as if to demand her contribution, too.
‘I suppose it has been a little dull without you,’ she conceded.
‘How kind.’ There was no longer any evidence of the surprise with which he had looked at her downstairs, the moment folded and put away as if it had never occurred. Had she imagined it?
Her thoughts were interrupted by Dawson, clearing his throat in the doorway.
‘Mr Thimbleby has arrived, my lady.’
Hetty’s ears pricked up – as, apparently, did Arthur’s, for he turned enquiring eyes upon his mother as he asked: ‘Father’s man of business?’
Lady Allerton’s smile, so beaming a moment before, grew rather fixed. ‘Thank you. If you could inform him that Arthur’s unexpected return means I will be unable to—’
‘Oh, don’t send the fellow away.’ Arthur took a draught of his tea. ‘If Thimbleby does not mind kicking his heels awhile, we might join him in only a few minutes.’
‘But you have only just arrived, my dear!’ Lady Allerton objected. ‘You must rest.’
‘You have been steering the ship alone for too long. It is high time that all such tiresome duties were taken from your shoulders – and I intend to see that they are.’
Lady Allerton fluttered her hands. ‘Arthur – do you mean …?’
For a moment, neither he – nor Hetty – understood the excitement in Lady Allerton’s voice, until Trixie enlightened them, asking baldly: ‘Do you mean to marry?’